Toys!

I just bought a new toy!  One of a type I’ve thought would be useful for quite some time.  I’ve just been too cheap to part with the cash!

My new toy is a portable scanner called NeatReceipts™ that’s made for scanning receipts, business cards and full size documents up to legal size.  I have a flatbed scanner that I generally use for most things.  The key to this one is the OCR software that comes with it along with its searchable database to store your scanned items in. 

I keep my household books in a spreadsheet I’ve written.  I’ve used a variation of this system for more years than I care to remember!  Ever since the days of that very first spreadsheet program on my Commodore 64 if you must know…  All the wile every bit of data that has been entered was typed in by hand. 

Until now that is. 

I just entered the first four records into my spreadsheet from exported data from receipts that were scanned in and “read” by the OCR software.  I did have to edit one of the receipts to correct a read error in the amount the item was for and to remove what the software took to be sales tax.  While it may sound pretty bad what with that being 25% of the total number of receipts entered, it’s really not.  This was a restaurant receipt with a hand written gratuity and total.  I was pleasantly surprised by how well it did with the various types of receipts I’ve scanned with it.

I should have done this years ago!