Receipt Scanner OCR?

[flyhyr]

I'm looking at my grocery expenses over the last year and they are quite high (~10k!).  I have all the receipts and would like to analyze the data to see where I could improve my spending.  Does anyone know of a receipt scanner that will extract the product name and price for each line item on the receipt? 

What I'm doing now is a manual hack where I scan the receipt, paste the image into OneNote, and use the "Copy text from picture" feature to drop the data into Excel.  I have about 150 receipts from the year so it would be nice if I could automate this further.

[pzxc]

I think maybe the Neat Scanner will do what you want (neat.com) -- but 150 receipts is way too low to be worth spending a couple hundred bucks on a new fancy scanner

150 receipts? It takes you what 3 minutes to do each one? So 450 minutes, or less than 8 hours of work?  Less than 1 full day of work from 1 person?  Don't spend money just for this.

Now if you're going to anticipate having the same problem again in the future...  then it might be worth it

(btw, I have a neat scanner and it's quite good)

[Prairie Stash]

Just do the last 3 months (app. 40 receipts), or just the last month while you set things up and then add months as necessary. If a pattern unfolds you're done, if not delve further. Usually the culprit is pretty obvious with minimal work.

I visually scan my receipts at the store, just to look for price mistakes. Store policy is $10 off or free if I find a mistake. It's made me pretty good at remembering prices.

[MDM]

I think maybe the Neat Scanner will do what you want (neat.com) -- but 150 receipts is way too low to be worth spending a couple hundred bucks on a new fancy scanner

150 receipts? It takes you what 3 minutes to do each one? So 450 minutes, or less than 8 hours of work?  Less than 1 full day of work from 1 person?  Don't spend money just for this.

Now if you're going to anticipate having the same problem again in the future...  then it might be worth it

(btw, I have a neat scanner and it's quite good)

Or if you can get a working used one for less: http://www.ebay.com/bhp/neat-scanner.  Interested to hear what you do - we might look into a used one ourselves....

[flyhyr]

Thanks for the responses!  I checked out the Neat scanner.  It looks pretty cool but the software appears to only pick up the vendor and total price, not the individual line item names/prices.  I decided to quit messing around with the SW and just enter the data manually.  It doesn't really take that long and Excel recognizes entries that are already in the column and will autofill after you type the first few characters.  That speeds it up quite a bit since we tend to buy the same items over and over again each week.

As Prairie mentioned, I'll start with a few months and enter more data as needed to get the complete picture.