I've been using a service called Shoeboxed.com. Why? I had a stack of receipts two feet deep that I needed to process for my taxes.
It's a pretty straight forward service. You sign up. They send you special envelopes. You stuff them – well neatly – into the envelope and mail it off. When they receive it, they scan them and use OCR to read the amount and the vendor. They put all of that information online for you to categorize, export etc.
The service itself is great. The website is the weakest link. The site is very slow sometimes, which if frustrating if you are trying to categorize a lot of receipts. If you click on a link accidentally, you are sent to a new page. If you are trying to process a batch of receipts and have gotten the information presented in a useful way, this new page behavior slows everything down.
This is the problem I have had with Jott, the transcriber service I mentioned some time ago. I got into the habit of telling it everything that I wanted to do. Trouble is, putting this data dump into a logical structure was incredibly difficult. It improved with their new iPhone application but by that time, the list was going to take me a long time to categorize well. Their local client – using Adobe Air – actually performed worse than the web app, in my opinion.
For all of the hoopla about web applications – and I do like them – sometimes a local client makes a task so much faster to execute.
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