The previous post talked about online business receipt storage (No More Shoeboxes). When tossing out shoeboxes, I think I spoke too soon. I’ve since surveyed what seem to be the contenders:
Shoeboxed: Very nice. Excellent for receipts and business cards. Allows you to e-mail or scan them. A bit slower than I’d like on navigation and search, but allows multiple simultaneous uploads, and has superior export features, including excel, intuit, and my own favorite – a PDF with both receipt log and receipt images in a single file. That last feature is why I’m going with Shoeboxed for now.
Evernote: While not laden with receipt-specific features, very flexible. Use tags for date, amount, category or item. Allows you to e-mail receipts. Very fast. Needs an export feature. Those last two features are the clincher. Speed and organization are so good that, even w/o receipt-specific fields, the tags work fine. If there was an export feature like Shoeboxed, I’d be inclined. In the meantime, I’m thinking this is my catch all scan organizer. It’s too cool and too useful not to use.
Neat Receipts: I’m interested, but I’m waiting for them to go web-based and allow me to use my own scanner. They acknowledge that web-based storage is the future, but it’s not ready yet. In fairness, they’re widely considered to have the best scan quality w. their scanners in the biz, they’re very affordable to get into ($110 at amazon) and, if you were going to house it on your own hardware, this would be the way to go.
Pixily: So promising, but what’s up? Excellent uploader, and it’s housed on Amazon S3 servers. Unfortunately, nearly every internal link (e.g. Organize) took me back to the home page, and my two uploaded documents seem to have been lost during processing. It was looking like Evernote, until then.
Docrage: Household receipts and a few expenses only. Interface is old fashioned. Didn’t upload a gif. It’s in beta, but it needs a serious dose of rethinking. Business is where the money is – drive that, and personal receipts will follow. Interface needs to be fast, not necessarily flashy. Multiple uploads, flawless search and organization, and a serious export feature. That’s where it needs to go.
Google: It wouldn’t be one of my blog posts unless it considered google. It wants google. I use small “G”, because, frankly, it’s too big of an underlying reality to be just a brand. I love Google Docs and Google Notebook. And I’d strongly consider the latter for this project, if it let me paste in or easily upload images. But it doesn’t. Time will turn that around. In the meantime, I’m betting Picasa or Picasa2 will do the job just fine. Think image uploader (web or software based) with extensive tag capability. Google has never pinned me down out of mere brand loyalty. They’ve bought and improved most of the things I’ve liked (think Writely). I’ll give them time on this one. If I had to, though, I know out of their two dozen tools in my arsenal, one would work.
So, the winner? Shoeboxed. With honorable mentions to Evernote and Neat Receipts.
