It's easy to create folders, attach additional information to an entry, and search entries by fields such as date, amount, vendor and tax category. The interface will feel familiar to anyone who's used applications such as QuickBooks or Excel.

Although scanning receipts, business cards and other documents and having the text automatically appear in a database file can certainly save time, expect to do some cleanup because OCR results may be spotty. I found that almost every scan required some correction.

Entries appeared missing key information such as the date of the receipt, and company names and e-mail addresses appeared garbled or showed up in the wrong field on business card scans. Understandably, the program can't translate graphical logos into text, but I also found that it had trouble correctly identifying fancy fonts on business cards, such as an Old English typeface.

Because the scans were clearly readable in the viewing pane and most of my documents were fairly clean, I was a little surprised to see that many text recognition errors. Editing these small mistakes is easy, and you could argue that it's more convenient than filling out paper forms, but it's certainly not a total breeze.

If you can live with that, the package's real value is unveiled when it's time to generate reports. NeatReceipts Professional will run a variety of reports that can be exported as PDF, HTML, CSV, text or TIFF image files.