Scanners!

My Twitter buds are talking about receipts and business cards this morning, so here's a run-down of my scanners. I own three scanners, one standard, flat-bed, one portable that is 9" wide, and one that is business card size.

My flatbed scanner is a Canon CanoScan 600U that is a few years old now. It runs the CanoScan Toolbox software. It's also set up with a TWAIN32 interface, so I can use it with a wide variety of applications. This scanner is your basic $80 flatbed. I haven't even attempted to install this scanner to firefoot, my new laptop. I just added getting the scanner running under Ubuntu as a task for me for this week.

I was using this to scan receipts for expenses reimbursement, but it presented a complication. Because it's a standard-size flatbed, I didn't pack it and bring it along when I traveled to teach. If I'm on the road for 3-4 weeks in a row, I wouldn't want to be bothered with doing expenses in the 24-36 hours on the in-between weekends. That meant the receipts were piling up on my desk for the week where I was home. by then, the entire task was the ultimate pain in the butt, and an experienced procrastinator like me got very good at avoiding them.

Most of us can get away with this to an extent. sure, your bookkeeper/accountant will fuss at you that they can't get things done. When you're married to your CPA, however, it's more complicated, as you can imagine.

Since I fly Delta regularly, I pass through Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport (ATL) regluarly. There are three great geeky things at ATL: a Palm Store, vending machines that sell iPods and accessories, and NeatReceipts.

The NeatReceipts concept looked interesting - a portable scanner that's not a flatbed, but a feed-through design. A typical scanner works like a photocopy machine; you put the original face down, and the bar with the scanning element is pulled across the length of the original, storing the image digitally as it goes. A feed-through scanner switches the movement. The entire scanner is page-width (9"), but it's only as thick as the scanning element, maybe 3" or so. That means it's very portable. The software is straightforward, scan-to-PDF, which is all most of us need to scan receipts.

I hesitated buying it, thinking, do I really need to spend $200 on another scanner? When my CPA threatened to withhold marital favors, I still procrastinated. When she threatened to change the locks, I figured she might be serious, so I bought one.

It's wonderful. I can pack the NeatReceipts scanner in my suitcase and do bills while watching TV on the road, emailing it all back to my CPA, thereby guaranteeing I don't have to sleep on the patio when I come home late one evening.

NeatRecepits has a MAC version of the software, as well, Greta. :-)


My third scanner is for business cards. It's an older CardScan (600x). In addition to the very-techie stuff I travel to teach, I also do a bit of "end-user" training, particularly stuff that helps self-employed and self-starters. It started with me showing folks in my BNI chapter a thing or two, and that grew into regularly scheduled classes. I taught the ACT! contact management software, occasional classes on MS Outlook, etc. One of the most popular classes I ever taught is called "How To Use A Business Card Scanner." I talk about how the scanner will scan a bitmap (graphical) image of the card, then use OCR (optical character recognition) software to turn that into fields in an "address book" style database. Depending on the specific software used, that scanned-card database can be exported to various other applications, like Outlook or ACT!

Business Card scanners are a very useful tool for those engaging in a lot of face-to-face business networking. If you go to business card exchanges, networking mixers, etc., you trade a lot of cards, and the prospect of keying all that data into your computer can be daunting. The CardScan scanner+software's pricetag ($225 or so) doesn't look so bad at that point.

(As an aside, the NeatReceipts website says you can scan biz cards with that scanner as well. I don't know how good their OCR software is, though.)

Which scanner works for you? A flatbed scanner is important for anyone who wants to scan photos, or use the scanner/computer/printer combination as a photocopy machine. NeatReceipts is perfect for road warriors, and the small, bizcard-size scanners make business networking a snap.