The scanner and software readily recognized business cards as 'contacts' and generally understood receipts were 'receipts,' although there were mistakes.

Using optical character recognition and parsing technology, the scanner and software are geared to recognize whether the item is a receipt, a contact or another document. But it happened when I, perhaps unfairly, fed a 34-inch supermarket receipt into the scanner. The software melted down at one point and appeared to endlessly scan one receipt. One crinkled receipt scanned as a blurry, illegible mess. Scanning receipts generally was easy, although occasionally I had to give a very thin receipt an extra nudge because the scanner didn't recognize there was an item ready for scanning. I tried the scanner and software at home, but could easily see breaking out the scanner in a hotel room and quickly feeding the day's receipts and business cards into it. I found the scanner and software fairly easy to use, although there were glitches. You also can feed business cards into the scanner and sync the particulars with Outlook, Plaxo or Mac Address Book. And it lets you save the items, convert them into PDFs, run customized reports, e-mail them and export them into Quicken.

It lets you easily view, categorize and edit your notations about the receipts. The software lets you organize the receipts and drag them into folders on your desktop. It retails for about $200, which seems a bit pricey, and comes bundled with the software. The portable scanner weighs less than a pound, easily fits into most laptop cases and hooks up to your computer with a USB connection. And, with the April 17 federal tax deadline approaching, this is an optimal time to consider an electronic way to better handle the reams of paper receipts and related documents for tax-filing purposes and throughout the year.

Neat receipts