Problem

Every day, I receive physical documents, such as receipts, invoices, account statements, insurance policy updates, and so forth. Each of these documents should be retained for some period of time. Some of these documents should be forwarded to other people (such as, insurance provider or CPA). Physical documents take up space, and unless one is really, really dedicated to filing and indexing, they’re time-consuming to search, copy, and purge.

Solution

Scan the documents. Run the scanned documents through OCR software to build a per-document list of search terms. Store each scan in a known location and feed the terms into a search indexer. Allow for additional notes to be associated with each document and index those notes, too.

So, Neat does this. Once upon a time, it did it all on my computer’s hard drive, with the option to send scans out to a service that would do more accurate metadata filling-in, and fetch the notionally higher-quality data back down to my computer. Nowadays, though, everything is remote. The scans are stored somewhere in the world, the database is stored somewhere that is Not My Computer, and because the client is some kind of JavaScript horror, every operation involves web requests. This means that processing everything takes longer and is more frustrating. It’s turning my document filing cabinet into write only memory.

The things that are annoying about Neat are really too numerous to list out, here, but fundamentally they all condense down to this: the software is optimized to make the workflow convenient for an accounting department and a pain in the neck for a sales rep, so that the company will spring for the extra service of human document processing. And, since the target customer is a company, the cost associated with keeping the service useful and usable is larger than what an individual human using it for household document management would want to spend.

Other Solutions

There exists another software package, PDFKeeper, that looks like it could be made to run on a hypothetical My Computer. However, it requires Oracle and Windows, because .NET and Fuck You.

I’m gonna have to write this thing, aren’t I? Please, no.