I recently had the opportunity to review one of those products that make you go “Where has this been all my life?!?!” It is the product to have for all of you receipt stuffers — you know who you are. You’re the ones who, after checking out at Target and dealing with a screaming toddler(s) just grabs the receipt from the lady and shoves it haphazardly into your purse/wallet/toddler’s mouth. Then you stop somewhere else on the way home and that receipt from that purchase ends up in the same place, so now you have two squished and crumpled receipts. Then later, said toddler gets a hold of your wallet while you’re in the shower and when you walk back into the living room, those receipts plus all of your credit cards are strewn about your living room. You’re busy, of course, so you just shove everything on the floor back into your purse, completely forgoeing the wallet this time.

Hm, I wonder if that’s how the leaf from my houseplant and some dog food ended up in the bottom of my purse?

Well, if the above description sounds like you, then I think you’d like Neat Receipts. On the other hand, if you are on the polar opposite side of that story and you are so particular that your receipts would have been filed neatly into your receipt drawer when you got home, well then we can’t be friends you’ll really love Neat Receipts.

Neat Receipts takes all of your receipts, big, small, crumpled and tall (long really, but tall rhymed and you can’t expect me to pass that up) and scans them into your computer for you. Then, not only do you have a copy of your receipt, but Neat Receipts takes the info from the scan and puts it all into nicely fileable fields. It even puts it into a category for you, like gas, so you can be depressed over see how much you spend on that item each month, week, or for the year. Cool huh?

I fed my Neat Receipts scanner every crumpled and faded receipt I could find and it still picked up almost all of the information without much help from me. The scanner itself is lightweight and easy to store or bring with you when needed. It is powered off of a USB cable, so there is no bulky power supply to tote, either. It even scans documents (we’re not just talking receipts here, people) straight into a PDF file, which is quite a useful feature – especially for e-documents and other things that you are supposed to “print and save for your records”.

You can buy Neat Receipts right from their website. There are two difference versions, one for Windows and one for Mac. I have the version for Mac, which supposedly doesn’t have as many options as the one for Windows, but honestly I didn’t notice any features that were missing from mine. The version for Windows is $149.95 and the Advanced Release for Mac is $179.95.

So tell me, what do you think? Is this something you could use at your home or office?