Before macOS High Sierra was released publicly, today, we couldn't talk about compatibility. Now that High Sierra has finally been officially released by Apple, we can.:-) The QuickBooks Mac (qbMac) development team has been hard at work making sure qbMac 2016 was compatible with High Sierra development builds since Apple started releasing them many months ago. QbMac 2016 is compatible with macOS 10.13 High Sierra. The release of the R21 update this morning coincided with today's public launch of High Sierra from Apple. The R21 auto-update release notes displayed when selecting 'QuickBooks Check for QuickBooks Update' contain this sentence at the top. ' This update is recommended for all users of QuickBooks Mac 2016 who are running on OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), macOS 10.12 (Sierra), and macOS 10.13 (High Sierra).' And in the bullet list of items it states this.
These Mac models are compatible with MacOS High Sierra: • iMac (late 2009 or newer) • MacBook Air (2010 or newer) • MacBook Pro (2010 or newer Don't forget that all download links are for free. You can find it on our home page and after that you can install last version MacOS High Sierra for free.
New Features from R20 ◦ Compatibility with macOS High Sierra (10.13) Please let us know if you run into any problems using QuickBooks Mac on High Sierra. We're always interested in customer feedback. Before macOS High Sierra was released publicly, today, we couldn't talk about compatibility.
Now that High Sierra has finally been officially released by Apple, we can.:-) The QuickBooks Mac (qbMac) development team has been hard at work making sure qbMac 2016 was compatible with High Sierra development builds since Apple started releasing them many months ago. QbMac 2016 is compatible with macOS 10.13 High Sierra. The release of the R21 update this morning coincided with today's public launch of High Sierra from Apple. The R21 auto-update release notes displayed when selecting 'QuickBooks Check for QuickBooks Update' contain this sentence at the top.
' This update is recommended for all users of QuickBooks Mac 2016 who are running on OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), macOS 10.12 (Sierra), and macOS 10.13 (High Sierra).' And in the bullet list of items it states this. New Features from R20 ◦ Compatibility with macOS High Sierra (10.13) Please let us know if you run into any problems using QuickBooks Mac on High Sierra. We're always interested in customer feedback. Yes, we have reports of the backup failing on High Sierra. Send me an email as noted - we are going to need to try to replicate the command line calls QB is making to see if it is an Apple error (i suspect it is but we may be able to work around it). Are you both on the new Apple File System?
(Select your main drive and choose File-Get Info and I thin it will say). As far as Bank of America - that should work. Are you using DirectConnect or downloading a.qbo file from Bank of America's site? It may be that Bank of America's server is down. I'd check (I have a BoA account) but.
My machine is being restored because of a botched High Sierra install.
I mentioned in my recent that while the scanner is good, what made me fall out of my chair was the under-the-radar inclusion of a new software feature called ScanSnap Receipt. This is something that ScanSnap users have requested for a long time – the ability to scan a receipt and have the ability to categorize and export the data for taxes, expense tracking, and the like. The new ScanSnap Receipt application ships with the, and it has started appearing via Online Update for and customers as well.
I am told that it will be released for the in October. Update: ScanSnap Receipt has now been released for Canada, and will be released in the EMEA region in Autumn 2015. One unfortunate note: Fujitsu has confirmed to me that ScanSnap Receipt is only available for the United States market.
If you have a ScanSnap that is purchased outside of the US, ScanSnap Receipt will not appear for you in Online Update. I’ll update this if this ever changes. Getting Receipts Into ScanSnap Receipt ScanSnap Receipt is a separate application and is not built-in to ScanSnap Organizer, their document management application. The con of this is that if you use ScanSnap Organizer to manage your documents, everything is not tied in. The pro of this is that if you do not use ScanSnap Organizer, you still have the benefit of receipt management and extraction. There are essentially three ways to get your receipts in to ScanSnap Receipt:. Scan a receipt and select ScanSnap Receipt in the Quick Menu.
Set up a ScanSnap Manager Profile for ScanSnap Receipt and use that to scan. Drag or import PDFs or JPGs in to the ScanSnap Receipt application itself. Let’s take a look.
Quick Menu When you scan a receipt and have the Quick Menu enabled, it does a pretty good job of automatically detecting that it is a receipt and you should see ScanSnap Receipt in the Recommended section. If for whatever reason it doesn’t auto-detect that it is a receipt, not a problem. Just find ScanSnap Receipt in the list. A nice touch – if you use Quick Menu and you have the ScanSnap Receipt application running, it will keep scanning subsequent receipts to ScanSnap Receipt.
You don’t have to keep selecting it. ScanSnap Manager Profile If you are not the Quick Menu type, you can set up a ScanSnap Manager Profile for your receipts. Just select ScanSnap Receipt on the Application tab. Drag Into ScanSnap Receipt You can drag a PDF or JPG image into the ScanSnap Receipt window, or use File Import. It will then process the receipt and OCR if necessary.
To my utter shock and awe, this works for documents that were not scanned by the ScanSnap. I tested it out scanning with a few mobile scanning apps, both OCRed and not, and it happily imported them all. I was sure it would be locked down the way ScanSnap Organizer is. ScanSnap Receipt Inbox For organization, ScanSnap Receipt uses inboxes, and has one called My Inbox by default. Anything you scan or import will go there. You can create other inboxes for high level organization if you’d like.
Editing Receipts It would be nice if you could scan a receipt and have all the text detected perfectly and placed in the correct fields perfectly. Unfortunately with pretty much any OCR solution, that will usually not be the case. There’s often something you need to tweak. In my experience so far, I have found that it is great at detecting dates, amounts, taxes, payment method, and card numbers. The Vendor name wasn’t super successful, though that is often a result of wacky logos etc.
It’s pretty hard for any program to know exactly which piece of text is the vendor. Fortunately, it is fast and easy to fix this stuff up. Editing Text If you just need to make a quick edit, you can type it directly in the spreadsheet-like view of all of the receipts. If you want to zoom in on an individual receipt, you can double-click it or select it and hit the Edit button. In this example, it has detected the date, amount, tax, and card of my unhealthy but delicious airport burrito, but it didn’t get the vendor right.
Of course, I could just type in the correct name, but ScanSnap Receipt has a cool select-and-OCR feature. Just select a bit of text in the receipt and it will pop up a window asking which field you’d like it placed in. I highlighted El Bravo and chose Vendor, and it put the correct text in the Vendor field.
Unchecked ScanSnap has a way for you to keep track of which receipts you’ve gone through and edited. There’s a field called Unchecked that has two states: Unchecked and Checked. By default any receipt that is scanned/imported has a state of Unchecked.
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Once you’ve edited a receipt, it changes the state to Checked. You can, of course, change that back and forth manually.
This is good to know if you are editing a receipt and all of a sudden it “disappears”. Chances are you have a filter set to only show Unchecked receipts. Categorizing Receipts The software comes with a set of Categories and Subcategories that you can modify. There is only one level of subcategories, so your hierarchy is only one level deep.
Combining and Splitting Receipts I have found the ScanSnap Receipt software pretty smart about automatically splitting receipts. If I scan two receipts with in one shot, it automatically splits them out to two separate receipts in the software. However, if you need to combine receipts or split manually, you can do this. Combining Receipts To combine receipts, you can highlight the rows that you want to bring together, right-click, and hit Combine. When you do, it will bring the receipts together and sum up the amount and the tax. Splitting Receipts You can also split up a receipt.
This is handy if you have different categories, or perhaps part of a receipt is for Business and part is Personal. For example, let’s take this receipt from Aunt Chilada’s. Perhaps my delicious carnitas tacos was a business expense, but I wanted the “Hand-Tossed Marg.” (whatever that is) to be a personal expense.
I right-click the receipt and choose Split, and I can make those changes. Once you do that, the receipt goes back into the Unchecked state and you can go in and review the changes. Searching and Filtering Receipts A nice thing about having all these fields to work off of is you can do some slicing and dicing to see (and export) just the receipts you want. The key is the handy + button that lets you filter by your fields.
Once you press that, you can add up to three levels of filters. So let’s say we wanted to find the tax deductible travel receipts.
Of course, you can just search by keyword as well and it will search the OCR’ed text of the receipt. Exporting Receipts The point of using a receipt program isn’t to do all this work organizing receipts – you presumably want to do something with the information. You can export the receipts as individual PDFs, as one big PDF, as JPGs, or as a CSV file. In ScanSnap Receipt for Windows, you can transfer receipts to Quickbooks Pro 2012 or later. You need to connect it to the company file, map the data for transferring, and then you can move data over. You can export an individual receipt or the selected receipts, which is where filtering can come in handy.
You can slice and dice the data exactly how you want it, and then export. You may find it helpful to check out the CSV that ScanSnap Receipts puts out. I’ve generated a Mac and Windows one just in case there are any wacky differences. Other than CSV/image export, there aren’t any reports that you can run from your receipt data.
Storage and Backup Here’s where things get slightly weird. As far as I can tell, all the receipt images and data is stored in a proprietary database. On the Mac, this is stored in /Library/Application Data/PFU/ScanSnap Receipt. On Windows, it is in your User folder under AppData Local PFU ScanSnap Receipt. The ScanSnap Receipt application provides a backup facility that can be found under Tools Backup. If you are going to be using ScanSnap Receipt, I HIGHLY recommend you:. Make sure that your regular backup routine is picking up that storage folder.
On some sort of regular basis use Tools Backup to back up your database and keep that file safe. Proprietary databases make me nervous, so protect yourself. Workflow And Closing Thoughts It isn’t 100% clear to me what Fujitsu’s intentions are around ScanSnap Receipt. Should people be storing their regular documents in ScanSnap Organizer and their receipts in ScanSnap Receipt? Is ScanSnap Receipt intended to be more “transactional”, where you dump your receipts into it when you want to get them ready for taxes/exporting? This is early days (the software has one been out for two days in North America) and as with most things to do with going paperless, I suspect we will all find the way that works best for us.
ScanSnap Receipt isn’t the most beautiful application in the world (Mac design people may not approve), but to me it hits the key areas: it can take a receipt, extract the information out if it, let you clean it up, and then export the data. I’d like to hear from you, especially if you have been waiting for years for a ScanSnap receipt tool. Does ScanSnap Receipt meet your needs?
What features would you like to see? I’ve been using ScanSnap iX500 for almost a year, and I’m here in Canada.
I received the ScanSnap Receipt file when I bought mine in 2017 so most of you shouldn’t have a problem! Now – I’d like to know the difference between: Category A and Category B. (When I go into settings — Category — you can choose either Category A or B) I have two businesses, and have different categories (main) that can drill down into sub categories. The problem is, I need to be able to drill down further. However that could only be done if Category A and Category B can be separated. When I got to click in the settings to change to Category B it says “All categories will be replaced at once. Categories with reference count of 0 will be Deleted.
Do you want to Continue? I don’t want to continue and delete everything so please help out wit this!! WHAT IS CATEGORY A or CATEGORY B??? I’m trying to learn about ScanSnap Receipt. I agree with your ending thoughts on “Fujitsu’s intentions, Should people be storing their regular documents in ScanSnap Organizer and their receipts in ScanSnap Receipt? Is ScanSnap Receipt intended to be more “transactional”, where you dump your receipts into it when you want to get them ready for taxes/exporting?” I just imported a ton of receipts, cleaned them up in ScanSnap Receipt and exported them as individual PDFs to a file folder and it seemed they lost thier OCR. So whats the point?
I’m having difficulty finding tutorials, videos, blogs on this topic. First, it is darn near impossible to find where the image files are stored. There is a “backup” function in the ScanSnap Receipt application, but a question is whether it saves the database data only or the database with the images. I had heard it only saves the database, but I believe now it includes the images, see below (.
It can take hundreds/thousands of hours to scan receipts, so it hopefully it saves the images too, otherwise it would be irresponsible design. I will try to test this myself.) Another thing that is painful – very hard to auto-fill certain fields. For example, many, many receipts are for repeat purchases. If the vendor is recognized, we should have the option to have the category, tax status, etc.
Auto-filled with the most common values for that vendor. But even better would be the ability to export the data to CSV file (which is now possible), modify the data in a spreadsheet or database program, and import it back (not possible) into ScanSnap Receipt. Then you use any fancy logic you want to auto-fill any blank fields. You can export to a CSV file, but you can’t currently import it back at this time. It would open up amazing possibilities if they implemented that, including migrating data from another receipt application, etc. Another feature for the wish-list would be to make custom fields for your receipt. I like to notate the location of the receipt expense, where the expense was incurred, things like that.
You can use the comment field, but it can become overloaded with different types of information. One more for the wish-list — put all the fields in the list of the “right-click-select-OCR-fill” menu. I’d like to highlight part of the receipt and OCR the info into the comment field, but that option isn’t available. By the way, I just talked to Boris in tech support (very helpful guy, better than most). He showed me where to find the ScanSnap Receipt image files. On my Windows 10 computer, they are in the folder: C: Users AppData Local PFU ScanSnap Receipt ssrimg body The files have no extension, but they are “jpg/jpeg” files, so if you copy one and add the “.jpg” extension, you should be able to see it in any image application. I have no way to verify this, but it looks like the database file with all your entered information is in the file: C: Users AppData Local PFU ScanSnap Receipt ssrdat So backing up those files might be another way to protect yourself or helpful for recovery.
Boris stated that when you use the “Tool Backup” feature, it saves both the data and the images, and he felt he could demonstrate that on his system. I’ll check, but looking at the size of my backup file and the sizes of the database and image files, I believe it is true. The database backup is actually smaller than the original files, but good compression could do that and it is still much bigger than the database file alone, so I conclude it includes the images. I have been using the SnapScan ix500 for about 2 months. I too switched from Neat when the scanner stopped working correctly and they offered no support.
I find the SnapScan ix500 a wonderful scanner. However, the SnapScan Receipt software leaves something to be desired. The biggest fault is no autofill when editing a receipt. Also, it would be nice if one could select a default for fields such as (Business, Personal, Unknown) and (Deduction, Non Deduction, Unknown). All in all, if I had to do it again, I would still get the ix500.
Hi Finally got my ix 500 working again with scansnap after 6 months (shaggy dog story) am delighted to get to use the receipt software here in the uk. Have had Brooks enormous help for some time #1 does receipt always fire up by itself if you scan a few receipts either with / without scan manager? If not how do you ensure it does? 2 dont ask me how, but ive got a business card inside my listing of scanned receipts, do i just delete it an re-scan it, or should it be transferred out of there somehow?? Thanks for the article Brooks. Thanks everyone for the comments as well. Like many I am transitioning from Neat.
We are OS X so the scanner simply stopped working one day when Neat stopped supporting the drivers. We were required to pay an additional $40 for the Neat Mac software on top of the Neat package, so we were always especially disappointed and frustrated with the instability and problems Neat for Mac had. The lost our trust when they decided to leave us high and dry so we are not interested in any solutions they have to offer.
I’ve been using the Scansnap ix500 for a few days now. What I’m really looking for is advice on whether there is something better out there for a scanner or software for our needs. I’m already very concerned with Fujitsu’s attitude towards Mac users and am ready to return this to jump ship to something else.
If you have any thoughts please share. The scanner itself has been wonderful so far. It is fast and smooth. Setup was fast and easy.
Hasn’t even hiccuped yet. I like how quiet it is, the design, and the small foot print. I was initially concerned that it didn’t have different sized feeders like the Neat scanner for business cards and such, but found by following the directions in the manual with placement on the rollers, these aren’t necessary. I think the Scansnap is far superior to the Neat scanner. The problems I already see are with the software. I mainly need the OCR for documents and receipts. I found that we don’t really need ScanSnap receipt as it is better for us to scan receipts to a central folder, or to the folder associated with a particular project.
It is too cumbersome to manually select vendors and categories in a drop down menu with no autofill. Receipts also doesn’t get a lot of the amounts correct so I end up typing these in manually by hand anyway. As others have pointed out, the inability to categorize or make changes to batches of receipts is unbelievable and a deal breaker for us.
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For our needs, because of the limitations of the software, it is better to have all of the receipts organized in folders and then to create reports manually when the time comes. If there is a better solution for software to manage receipts I’d love to hear any suggestions. What we do need is good OCR and workflow on documents. I’ve already determined that it is much better for us to “scan to folder” than to use the organizer. This is where a number of issues come up for Mac users. I’ve been trained over many years to scan documents face up. I’m dumbfounded at the Scansnap does not allow Mac users to do this and requires face down scanning.
This really slows down our workflow because we need to be able to read and then type titles and headings from the pages we load to use in naming the.pdf files created. We now have to pick the documents up after scanning and turn them over and set them down every time we create a file. This is very cumbersome. To add insult to injury, PC users are able to easily change this setting. Despite other Mac users already asking for this change, it is not available.
Easy fix and not understandable why Fujitsu would neglect Mac users this way. It isn’t a convenience issue.
It is a productivity issue. The software also doesn’t allow any editing of the scanned image before saving. The Scansnap creates many more blank pages than Neat did by detecting slight creases of bleed through from the other side. This wouldn’t be an issue except that removing these pages before saving is impossible. The file must be saved, located, opened in another application like Preview, and only then can the page be deleted.
Of course, this applies to all edits such as orientation errors and changing the order of the pages. I would like to make these changes BEFORE saving the file. If there is a workaround I am missing please share. Is there a better solution for us? Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
I got my ScanSnap in December 2016 and am just getting around to looking at ScanSnap Receipt. I found my data file here: /Library/Application Support/PFU/ScanSnap Receipt/Receipt DB.ssrdb I’m running macOS Sierra. If you right-click on Receipt DB.ssrdb and choose Show Package Contents you can see the individual data files.
In the subdirectory ‘ssrdat’ there is a file named ‘receipt.ssrd’. I opened this file with TextEdit and saw the file began with ‘SQLite format 3’, so I’m guessing the program uses SQLite and that file is the database file. In the subdirectories ‘ssrimg/body’ there are a collection of files without extensions. When I highlight one I see an image of a receipt in Finder (using the multi-column view).
Right-click and select Get Info and it displays that the file’s Kind is a TIFF image. It seems like a nice, clean, straight forward design to me. Yes, you need Fijutsu scanner and software. For non-Fijutsu scanner, you can try Mariner Paperless. But if you have used ScanSnap scanner, you would not consider anything else.
There are so many things that ScanSnap does so effortlessly that you take it for granted, until you try to do the same thing with other scanners. I tried using a Brother All-in-one and it was a pain. First the auto feeder was not designed to take small/narrow pieces of receipts. I could not get it to scan using the auto feeder, so you I have to use the flat bed to scan one by one.
By comparison, I can load a pile of receipts in all different sizes and lengths, and ScanSnap would finish it is minutes. ScanSnap also automatically resize all the scanned image to match the original receipts – and properly rotated, and deskewed. So all scanned images look perfectly aligned and correctly sized. I could not get my Brother All-in-one to do the same. Brother has some dedicated scanners which may work better, but I have not tried those.
But their ScanSnap Receipt competitor – BR-Receipt is not available outside US! Have to join the dog pile. It’s disgraceful that a company holds its customers hostage in such a way.
There is literally no reason this software shouldn’t at least. Hi Brooks, I’m a new scansnap ix500 user with a lot of receipts to process. Each google search I have tried (many) brings up your blog – congratulations for having such a high google profile. The thing is this: I can’t believe that Scansnap would not have settings that allow users to process the data quickly once imported. It seems unbelievable to me that I will have to spend literally hours deselecting ‘personal’ which is the default setting & replacing each field with ‘business’ and deselecting ‘non deductable’ and replacing ‘deductable’ for each single entry. It seems obvious that the defaults should be exactly reversed.
It seems obvious that the vast majority of times a user is going to be ‘saving’ receipts for the purposes of declaring tax deductions for the IRS? There are so many clicks I am now required to make to get this to work. No autofill in any of the fields? A ‘Vendor’ drop down menu that is cumbersome. And no way to correctly tag a set of receipts in bulk? I have found a few people refer to how cumbersome this is.
It’s going to take me a day to correct these receipts which is not really faster than logging the numbers into a spreadsheet. I would welcome your comments here since you seem to have the floor with users like me and with Fujitsu Scansnap company. Thanks for your good work in posting information about the steps to go paperless!
Hi Brooks, great write up! Also I love your site, there’s a lot to learn here.
I would really love the Receipt software, if I didn’t have a similar problem to Megan’s. I am scanning lot’s of receipts, so it seems kind of ridiculous to me, that there isn’t A fast way to categorise receipts at once.
I wish there was a function like this: “select several receipts-right click-change category/subcategory” I mean the functionality is already built in, you can Already do what I just said with the Checked/Unchecked property, so I see no reason why you couldn’t batch-edit the other fields as well. Or is there some way to do this which I haven’t found out yet? What I resorted to was Scanning all receipts of a particular category, then selecting them all and export to a CSV, and then edited the CSV data directly.
And then start over doing the same with the next category/subcategory. Then in the end I copy & pasted the edited data into one central Excel file.
But to be honest I am kind of disappointed, As it would be so much easier to use this software if it just had a proper right click menu to batch edit any of the fields. My interest is the Scan Snap Receipt software.
I eventually learned that this software is not supported for the ScanSnap S1500. My major gripe is why not?
After spending $600 CAD, I am not about to go out and buy a new scanner, yet the receipt software is something that I’ve been hoping for from Fujitsu. I’m sure Fujitsu personnel SCAN this site so my complaint is aimed at them.
Your decision to not support S1500 customers with Scan Snap Receipt jeopardizes future sales of S1500 owners seeking hardware replacements because they won’t trust you to support the life cycle of the hardware. Is that a wise decision? Please re-consider, and configure Scan Snap Receipt for S1500 customers. Motivated by not wanting to fill up my C drive, I looked for the ScanSnap Receipt folder as guided by Brooks, (so I could store the data & receipt elsewhere, just not in proprietary format).
According to Fujitsu though, they do not want you to find that folder “because it’s too easy for users to mess up things up.” Thus Fujitsu has ‘hidden’ that folder. However, I can export my data in a CSV file and as individual PDF’s to another location (for my purposes, off my C drive). In reading the Help file, once those files are exported, I can come back to ScanSnap Receipt and delete the receipt(s), which moves the selected items to the trash can, and then empty the trash can (the receipts are not deleted permanently until the trash can has been emptied). This way I have the data from the CSV file, plus a PDF (if I need to go back and produce a hard copy for whatever reason), and my C drive isn’t clogged. With my back-up of my other location, I’m happy, and ScanSnap Receipt is kept running nice and lean. (Additional thought: with some of the previous updates to the software, some folks have had issues with their already scanned info; operating as I mentioned above, hopefully makes this a non-issue with future updates.) Hope that might be helpful to someone, but if anyone thinks of a problem I could be heading towards, please speak up. I’ll get it right yet.
Open Windows Explorer, in the address bar type%localappdata% this will take you to your AppData Local folder C: Users MyName AppData Local click on the PFU folder Cut the “ScanSnap Receipt” folder and put it on your data drive D: for example Open the command prompt (cmd.exe) as Administrator Search for cmd in the start menu, right-click and choose ‘Run as Administrator’ mklink /D “C: Users MyName AppData Local PFU ScanSnap Receipt” “D: ScanSnap Receipt” replace “MyName” with your user name. This will create a “symbolic link” from the Appdata Local folder to D: ScanSnap Receipt” folder.
The program will be accessing the data on drive D instead of drive C note you can link to other folders or drives just change the path to where you moved the ScanSnap Receipt folder. Hello, I recently purchased a Fujitsu IX500 and installed the ScanSnap Receipts program. I have also been using a Neat Scanner and have years of scanned receipts in their NeatReceipts program. Is there a way to export that data and import it into ScanSnap Receipts? I know you can export from NeatReceipts but the exported file is in a proprietary Neat format. I recently relocated and had the Neat Scanner stolen. I’m hoping not to have to buy another one and use it side-by-side with the Fujitsu since it is such a superior scanner.
Here’s hoping! Actually I just dumped my Neat Desk & am doing what you are asking about right now. I’ve had Neat Desk since 2011 & have a ton of receipts, but moving them over is not as bad as I thought. I have my receipts broken down in folders by years & in business & personal. When I open 2015 business I can right click on a receipt, then choose export.
From there a dialog box opens where I can choose to export as PDF, then choose to export the entire folder, then export as separate receipts, then export to a folder on,y desktop called 2015 business receipts, then click export. After a few minutes I have an individual PDF for ever 2015 business receipt, from there you just highlight them all & drag them to my new 2015 business receipt folder I made in snapscan receipts & they appear. I was really sweating having to do one receipt at a time, I was thrilled to see the export folder option in Neat. I thought I would post this as a token of my gratitude; I would not have learned even learned about the existence of ScanSnap Receipt if not for this website, and the idea that Canadians would be excluded from software that is equally sought after left me cough you know!. I emailed Fujitsu, and though I may not have expressed my discontent with a cheery disposition, they replied with utmost professionalism and provided the following: —————————————————————————————– Thank you for buying our ScanSnap iX500 scanner. Canadian customers can download the ScanSnap Receipt software by filling in the request form at the URL shown below. Shortly after you submit your completed form you will receive an e-mail response with the actual download URL, a user name, and temporary license.
I hope that you enjoy your ScanSnap Receipt software! ——————————————————————————————— So to my fellow Canadians Enjoy!!!! Note: temporary license = temporary password. It did indeed work!!! The link brings you to the page “Download Request Form for ScanSnap Receipt”.
From there you begin Step 1: Enter the “PART NO.”, “SER.NO.”, “Name”, & “E-mail Address” then click submit Step 2: Confirm your entries Step 3: Submit the form If your entry correctly matches an eligible ScanSnap product, you will receive an email mine was nearly instant with a link to download the product, click the link and after you enter the user name and password from the email. Voila – both Mac and Windows versions are available to download and they install and run perfectly. They also include all updates previously released.
Thank you so much again for this article! You are so WELCOME! As a legal professional, I also feel I should mention to all your readers those that decide to use the above link, make sure that you read the email you receive in its entirety, as it contains very explicit legal warnings that prohibit the dissemination of any of its content, and by any means. Put simply, Fujitsu expresses their intention to maintain legal title and control of their intellectual property, and those that breach this by forwarding, posting or sharing the confidential information Fujitsu has disclosed, do so despite the conditions and notice contained within! Have a great weekend and HAPPY SCANSNAPPING!!! Brooks I’ve been using Neat Receipts since their Version 1.0, and I’ve just finally had it with their proprietary database, constant version changes (which are not backwards compatible for your backups) and their push to sell cloud subscriptions. Hence my desire to push to a more conventional receipts storage system that won’t depend upon the good nature of the software company to continue to support in the future I did write, back in the early days, a macro in Excel to take Neat Receipts output and generate a QIF for Quicken.
(before Neat added QIF support) Once I get this up and running I’ll adapt it for ScanSnap Receipt and send it to you for anyone that might want to use it that way. It was pretty much a 1-click deal, it just involves the middle step of opening the Excel file to translate the csv into QIF.
Will keep you posted. Thanks for the help with customer supp’t! I have been using the receipt software since it came out last year – without any major issues.
Yesterday, I received the error “Failed to start up Scansnap Receipt.” I found help in the Knowledge Base that suggested it may be a corrupt database or installation so recommended the typical uninstall/reinstall. This did not help at all. The scanner works, all the other ScanSnap applications work, just no ScanSnap Receipt.
My concern is that I will lose seven months of receipts – that I have of course shredded. You know, this software is a beautiful mess. First, had to contact tech support to find the right link to download it / software update was outdated but could not update.
Second: OK i have 1000s of receipts that i use for my bookkeeping in Quicken. I slurp hundreds of them in at a time, already OCRed with the nice Abbyy engine at scan, and the beautiful mess happens.
Vendors are messed, usually in a regular enough way. There is no way i can find to select a subset batch of receipts and re-assign the Vendor to the entire selection.
Dealing with thousands of receipts and just getting the vendor right should not be a one by one thing. There are also subtlities to this as well; It’s from the Whole Foods Beacon Street as opposed to the Whole Foods River Street Cambridge verse Whole Foods Cambridge Street Boston (usually all with diff. Store numbers or at least addresses) The math is all over the place. These are 300dpi b/w scans from an imperfect world.
90% of the time searching dates or stores in OS X finder works fine. But sometimes, broken printers, spills on receipts, all sorts of stuff happens. I cannot tell where the bad OCR on numbers is happening.
I tend to scan receipts with OCR to copy/paste from the PDFs. The app is a good start but needs refinement; either the Japanese developer needs more real-world receipts to match the code against, the OCR implementation isn’t as good as just OCRing the receipts at scan (all my Whole Foods come in as treet in vendor), some sort of accuracy stats need generation and looped back to devs, something. Since you asked, here are some of the biggest challenges for me. That said, the software is wonderful, and I am using it, so there is much more good than bad! The biggest challenge is what to do with receipts suffering from the problem of “disappearing ink.” If there were a feature that would automatically increase the contrast of anything looking like text as you bring a receipt into this software, that would be super helpful. Or even a tool within the software – like a magic illuminating wand or something – to help you clarify an area of the receipt. I’m often reticent to throw away a receipt that’s like that, because the print doesn’t show up on the scanned version, but I can see it when I hold the physical receipt up to the light.
For one very important receipt I had, I ended up putting it into photoshop. But that’s really time-consuming for one receipt. Also, when you add a category or subcategory but mistype it, it’ll add the mistyped name to the database, which is annoying, because there’s no apparent way to get rid of it. (If there is, please enlighten me. It’s not in any of the predictable places.) 3. Another thing is that the dropdown menus are too short by default, so you always have to scroll. You ALWAYS have to scroll because the dropdown combo boxes don’t have autocomplete, so if you start typing, you run the risk of creating an additional category you didn’t intend to create, which you can’t get rid of (see item 2 above).
Thanks so much! Re: Storage and Backup. The data is not stored in a proprietary database. It is stored in a folder that is hidden by the Mac OS. But you can navigate there using a Terminal window or see it by right-clicking on the file “Receipt DB.ssrdb”.
By selecting “Show Package Contents” you’ll see the two folders “ssrdat” that contains the database and “smimg” that contains the scans. Scans are image files viewable in Apple’s Preview app and can easily be converted to PDFs. As for the database, the header states SQLite format 3 and it appears readable with free software available in Apple’s App store.
By default, Apple’s TimeMachine will back up the files. In short, no need to be nervous about losing one’s data! Love it this is exactly what I was looking for. Let me qualify that, it has some quirks and poorly documented.
It occasionally gives you errors. I am sure most of this will be worked out in future releases. What I Like is the flexibility. I have used neat receipts and paperless. Neat receipts is very good at receipts. It is also very slow and cumbersome to use.
I was able to take my rental property receipt and group them by property with the folders. I then ran filters to zero in on the year.
Was able to export a CSV file of results. But the best part was when I exported all the receipts for the property to pdf and sent it to file center for future filing an backup based on tax year.
In file center I only see one pdf and it has all the individual receipt for a given year. I hope this inspires others to experiment with the flexibility of this product. ScanSnap Receipt on My Mac FINALLY!
I just bought an iX500 and set it up on my Mac (running Yosemite). I tried everything to find the elusive ScanSnap Receipt for Mac to no avail. I had all but given up. But then I read a PC related comment (way above) by the person who finally got Receipt on his PC after running the online updater several times.
As a last ditch attempt, I ran the AutoOnlineUpdater (from my Launchpad) but alas it only found an update to ScanSnap manager. After I installed that, I decided to try one last ditch last ditch effort and ran the AOUSetting tool (in Launchpad). I clicked “Check for Updates” and a new dialog popped up directing me to connect my scanner to USB and turn it on and click “Identify Device” so that it could look for the correct updates. As soon as I complied, voila!
ScanSnap Receipt showed up as an update. I’m noticing a couple of issues: 1) When you are splitting a receipt (e.g. When part is deductible, part is not), typing in the amount for the split portion gives an error message (“the total is different from the original amt” or something like that) – the app should KNOW what you’re trying to do and adjust the remainder accordingly. Quicken does this – why don’t these guys? Do I really have to subtract in my head or drag out the calculator? 2) When you enter a vendor that the app is familiar with, it should autofill the category and etc.
Fields for you. It’s a huge pain to use the pull-down menus over and over again. Every time I enter “Rite Aid” it should know I want to choose categories that point the data toward recording amounts paid for Rxs, for example. Another way to do it would be to autofill as you type – typing “H” would give “Health,” and “P” would give “Prescriptions,” for example. But autofilling based on the vendor would be the smart solution. If anyone has found a way to solve these problems I’d appreciate knowing. These issues make the app’s user interface a little flat-footed and less elegant than it should be.
Ok everyone, major problem here. SS Receipt updated to the latest version (V1.0L30) via SS Online update and when I reopened the program after the update, all of my unprocessed receipts that were in my inbox have lost their images.
Completed (Checked) receipts that I have processed prior to the update appear to be ok, but all the receipts I scanned into SS Receipt but didn’t edit (Unchecked) all have “No Image” on the receipt entry and unedited OCR results in the list. Major problem. Fortunately, I’ve been backing up the DB everytime I use it, so I’m able to restore and the images reappeared for the unprocessed receipts, except now there’s a duplicate of each. I’ve submitted a support request online.
Love our ix500 even without the twain support. But one thing i noticed is the lack of multi-user/device support. My wife and i are on different computers but need to have access to documents we scanned. Our workflow uses google drive for storage. It works well for collaboration and accessibility but we’re stuck with receipts as pdf files. I’m looking for a way for a software to take my pdf receipts and turn them into a database. This software looks like it’ll do it but i’ll lose the “cloud” feature.
Has anyone gotten this to work with multiple users/devices? Can you change the location of the database file and use google drive instead? Is there anything that’ll OCR my pdf receipts and put them in a database but have it online with multiple user support?
I’ve noticed a few annoyances with ScanSnap Receipt that really need to be addressed if it’s going to be a mainstream application. 1) You can’t have multiple files. I want to have one file for personal use and one for business but there is no option to create/open/save files anywhere. 2) When you scan a receipt, the OCR attempts to determine the Vendor, which is fine except it stores that vendor in the database, even if it’s unreadable hieroglyphics. What’s worse, there is no way to go in and delete entries from the list of vendors.
3) There is no way to add additional columns to receipts, like an invoice number or some other reference information you would like to track This application has a lot of potential, but until the above items, and likely many more, are addressed it borders on unusable. Hey Brooks, Great article! I just found out about this ScanSnap Receipt software. Don’t know how/why I didn’t get the info when it came out in September. Anyway, I installed the software and scanned one receipt. I use Quicken Premier and all my credit card transactions are downloaded there.
I am wondering what benefit do I get in using ScanSnap Receipt software while I have all the data for report or tax purposes in Quicken. Am I missing anything here? BTW, I do scan certain receipts as PDF and scan to a network mapped drive/folder. Thinking that by using ScanSnap Receipt software, I had the following extra steps/tasks: 1. Constantly worried about database backup and have to backup manually 2. If I need to do anything with the data, now I need to do export and import steps. And, if I need a PDF of the receipt, I need to export that as well because I noticed that even though I had specified the network drive/folder in the ScanSnap profile, the PDF file didn’t get saved there and instead it got “saved” within ScanSnap Receipt database.
So, I am really not seeing much here. What am I missing? Thanks, Anil. Exported PDF files should include searchable metadata. Inclusion of the hand-entered/verified metadata would be especially helpful when sending off copies of receipts to third parties such as accountants, etc.
Additionally, I may wish to have searchable receipt imagery available to me without needing to go back to the machine that has ScanSnap Receipt installed. I hope this functionality wasn’t consciously omitted due to some focus on lock-in, ie trying to keep people tied to ScanSnap receipt software for all reasons.
Some other areas for improvement: – Ability to edit/clean up Vendor list. Many of the wrong guesses of the OCR are ending up in the vendor list, making it cluttered and dirty. – Better keyboard commands for editing entries, both in list and ‘edit’ view.
Going to edit view and limiting me to ‘Finish’ and ‘Cancel’ via the keyboard at initial display of that screen isn’t terribly helpful. For data fields making use of a selection list, be able to expand/display their selection list via keyboard command in edit and list views. – Fix the bug (or behaviour) when entering some years in two-digit form in the date field – which seems to be 2010 or 2011 I think, ie ’10’ or ’11’. Entering those years in two-digit format does not take, forcing entry of all four digits. There is also some wonky behaviour at times in the month and date fields. – Some additional user-defined categorisation fields might also be helpful.
Gordon, after you’ve emptied the trash folder located within the SS Receipt app, you then need to exit the app completely and restart it. The app will only retain the vendor entries that it finds in your existing receipt data, including the app’s trash folder. I did notice in my earlier runs the vendor list cleaned up somewhat, but not in later scanning sessions.
Hadn’t emptied the trash folder after the early sessions! Problem solved. Thank you Luke – had literally just downloaded a SQLite client to do editing. Great timing! I’m running SS Receipt V1.5L41.
I like the scanner a lot but the software goes “clunk” on some basic stuff. As with earlier versions, it accumulates junk in the Vendor list and in the credit card number list. Seems to automatically post them whether you’ve finished editing or not. Neither of these fields have an in-app editor function to clean out the junk. The Vendor List just has a click-off/on box whether you want to see them in a pull-down list and the credit card list doesn’t even have that which makes for a lot of risk of secondary mistakes when the account number list is riddled with erroneous interpretation entries in small numbers from which to pick.
Editing lookup tables is pretty basic database function in my world. Is it hubris coming out of the marketing department with their pitch that “the OCR gets it right every time” why these edit tools are not included in the software? Brooks, this looks very, very similar to Mariner Siftware’s Paperless. It looks so similar that I wonder if it is a revamped version of Paperless? If it’s not, is there any obvious benefit between the two, aside from price? I’ve been using Paperless with my various ScanSnaps over the years, and find it very helpful and useful for my purposes. It really just indexes individual PDFs and assigns metadata to them, but hides them in an Apple package file so they’re not immediately apparently accessible.
It’s easy enough to get to them with a right-click, and the fact that they’re PDF and not proprietary files means it’s possible to recover or extract them if necessary. You are correct – it is Mariner’s product – from Mariner’s website Mariner and Fujitsu – Paperless and Scanners for the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Europe A partnership between Mariner and Fujitsu has resulted in the integration of Paperless with their best-selling ScanSnap scanners. Paperless is designed from the ground up to work effortlessly with the ScanSnap iX500, S1300i, and the ultra-mobile S1100. As a result, we decided to create the Paperless-ScanSnap Bundle. This bundle includes a copy of Paperless for Mac, and any one of these three, cross-platform, ScanSnap scanners.
The best thing about our partnership with Fujitsu is that we can offer the Paperless-ScanSnap Bundle to anyone in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand or Europe. Great review, Brooks. I don’t need a new scanner, but I do need software that handles receipts. If I had my druthers, I’d want something that would work with my existing ScanSnap S1500.
But since that may not happen with ScanSnap Receipt, I may just have to buy an iX100 if I can’t find another option. There’s an interesting review of the iX100 on Lawyerist.com where the reviewer sings its praises, but doesn’t recommend buying it.
Instead, he recommends using an app like Scanner Pro and has included a video comparison in the review. I’ve looked at just using my Android smartphone with Neat Cloud for my receipts, but current reviews of the Neat app are very, very bad. So I’ve ruled out that approach for now. Are there any other Windows receipt processing programs around that are capable of working with an S1500?