Ah, tax season. When millions of American adults tell themselves that the coming year will surely be when they finally get their documents in order — because goodness knows they don’t want to have to repeat the hellish experience they’ve just gone through in tracking down the paperwork they need to be able to finish their tax forms on time.

The device I’m about to share with you surely sounds like a miracle cure, but sometimes, friends, miracles do happen. This one is called the NeatReceipts Scanalizer Handheld Scanner.

The Scanalizer is a scanner with specialized software built-in. Simply scan all those bits of paper that come fluttering into your life everyday — gas station receipts, medical bills, service invoices, business cards, W2 forms, frequent flyer statements, credit card accountings. NeatReceipts reads data from all of them and puts the information into a spreadsheet form for you. Apparently, it can parse out totals, vendor names, whether the transaction was by cash or credit card and the like and creates separate columns that you can then use for importing to the bookkeeping software of your choice. Or you can simply save the files it creates and do a search on them when you’re tracking down a particular bit of information.

If you’re scanning a business card, the person’s name, title, address and company information is captured and syncs directly with Outlook, Plaxo and vCard.

Here’s how a couple of  PriceGrabber.com reviewers weigh in: Bomma1, who has been using the device for a couple of years, says: “This made my life very easy. No need to fill out weekly expense sheets for my company. Scan all the receipts and at one hit of a button, it creates an Excel or PDF version of all the expenses with all the fields populated from a standard template and attaches a scan of all receipts if you choose spreadsheet option. The scan of the images is added to the second worksheet on the spreadsheet. At the end of the year you can prepare reports to consolidate all the expenses for a vendor or by month or for the expense type.”

Amartini, who works in an accounting firm, says, “We reviewed this item for a few customers, and based on just a few weeks’ worth of uses, it works as advertised, and once properly set up to export to Quickbooks, it does do it, and makes life easier especially when it comes to doing expense sheets. Brilliant!”

Although the product sounds a bit pricey for its function — between $150 and $200 –when you’re considering a purchase like this, you have to put that cost in terms of your time. Let’s face it. None of us is getting any younger. We need to squeeze out those wasted minutes of our lives where we can. I don’t know about you, but filing hardcopies of anything is no longer in my job description. Just call me Digital Di.

Posted on March 25th, 2008 by dian