The aptly named Neat Co. has a new product that many folks, particularly those who run small businesses or need to maintain detailed tax records, will find attractive. The $499 NeatDesk combines a specialized scanner with some clever software that lets you digitize and organize those messy, easily lost, or misfiled paper documents.

The sheet-fed scanner has three slots: one for business cards, one for cash register tapes or credit-card receipts, and one for sheets up to standard business size. You can put as many as 10 documents in any of the slots at once. Hit the scan button, and the documents shoot through the system and are parsed by the NeatReceipts software, which runs on Microsoft Windows and on the Mac OS.

I was especially impressed by the system's ability to handle cash-register receipt tapes. These are generally produced by low-quality thermal printers and can be quite difficult to read, even for humans. The software tries to figure out the vendor, the date, the total purchase price, and the sales tax. If it can't read the vendor's name, you can type it in by hand, and chances are good the system will recognize the name the next time it appears on a receipt. I found that the software also excelled at reading larger receipts, such as hotel bills, fed through the document slot.

Quoted: A handy scanning system brings order to piles of different-size paper records.