I’ve had a love affair with Neat scanners for a while now and the company has just updated their roster with two new cloud offerings, the aptly-named NeatCloud and a mobile scanning system called NeatMobile.
For those not in the know, Neat is essentially a scanner for receipts, documents, and business cards. It’s surprisingly fast and efficient and has allowed me, personally, to reduce my paper load considerably. NeatCloud is a fairly simple concept. It’s basically a cloud backup service for Neat documents. The service is a lot like Evernote in that it allows you to save documents via email and grab information on the fly.
NeatMobile is a bit more interesting. Like the Neat scanner, NeatMobile lets you take photos of documents and upload them for instantaneous OCR. If you’re handling a lot of receipts, for example, you can grab shots and send them to the cloud as soon as you get them, rather than running a batch when you get back to the office. Both services offer improved search and filing thanks to server-side algorithms.
Pricing plans range from $5.99 to $24.99 a month. $6 gets you NeatCloud while the other two plans give you access to NeatMobile.
While it will never beat the sound of a few hundred business cards thunking through a Neat scanner, these improvements put Neat in a more interesting position vis a vis the cloud.