Pandemic or not, tax season underlines Ben Franklin’s comment that nothing in life is certain except death and taxes. And with tax season starting a bit later this year, and many of your clients stuck working remotely, you’ll need all of the tools you can get to make the tax prep process go as smoothly as possible.
One of those necessary tools is a decent scanner. If your scanner is more than a few years old, or if you’ve been using the scanner on a multifunction printer, it’s time to consider an upgrade. Not coincidentally, I received new scanners to test from Fujitsu and Epson, both directly targeted toward assisting at tax time, though they are not restricted from operating in other modes such as document management and archiving.
What makes the Fujitsu SnapScan iX1600 and Epson RR-600W different from run-of-the-mill scanners is the software each comes with. Both scanners are remarkably similar in both features and price, and the software, ScanSnap Home with the iX1600 and Receipt Manager with the Epson RapidReceipt RR-600W, are designed to scan receipts, invoices, and documents of all kinds and sizes, OCR them, and extract the relevant fields into files that can either be read in Excel, or imported into tax prep and/or accounting software directly.
This isn’t exactly new. Epson has had its ScanSmart Accounting software (also known as Receipt Manager) for several years now, and it gets more accurate every year. And if you go back a decade or so, Neat Receipts did pretty much the same thing, albeit nowhere near as accurately. It should be noted that Neat abandoned the hardware side several years ago, but still provides receipt scanning to the cloud. I can’t comment on how accurate it is compared to that of the Fujitsu or Epson as I haven’t tested Neat in several years, but if you’re a user, it should work just fine with either scanner if you want the easy connectivity and ease of operation that these new scanner models offer.
Both of these scanners are similar in capabilities, size and price. And to be honest, I’m happy recommending either. While I wanted to get this article done as early in the tax season as possible, I haven’t yet been able to do the in-depth testing I usually like to do. But several things stand out in a positive way in both units I was sent. The first is scan capability. Both the Epson and Fujitsu scanners are duplex models, capable of scanning both sides of a two-sided document in a single pass. Both have large ADFs (automatic document feeders), 50 sheets for the iX1600 and 100 sheets for the RR-600W, and can handle receipts, invoices and documents of mixed sizes up to 8.5 inches in width and 118 inches long (SnapScan iX1600) or 20 feet long (RR-600W). It’s not very likely that you’ll have to scan documents or receipts of that extreme length, but if you have to, you can.
Scan speed is measured using two metrics. One is pages per minute (ppm) the other is images per minute (ipm). With duplex scanners such as these, the Epson RR-600W’s 35 pages per minute translate to 70 ipm when scanning two-sided documents. The ScanSnap iX1600 is a little faster at 40 ppm and 80 ipm, but in reality, the scan speeds are close enough so the difference in actual use is not really discernible.
Also similar are the terrifically large 4.3-inch color touch screens, similar to those you’ll find on today’s upscale multifunction printers, and USB and Wi-Fi connectivity on both units. Both the Epson and Fujitsu scanners have terrific OCR software for those “regular” document-scanning jobs that can produce searchable PDF files. While I haven’t yet done a formal test of OCR accuracy, a quick look showed just a few errors over a 5-page ground truth test document set, which are excellent results. Keep in mind that even though OCR has improved greatly over the past decade, there’s no such thing as 100-percent accuracy over the long run, though you may achieve it occasionally on some of your scan jobs.
Both scanners are priced at just under $500, which is a good price for a scanner with the capabilities, speed and accuracy that both offer. With another tax season now upon us, you can be sure that while many clients will submit electronic versions of relevant documents, possibly in PDF format, getting these into a format, such as a CSV or XML file, is going to be time consuming and tedious. A new scanner, with more accurate software and the ability to turn paper receipts and other documents into usable files, can easily save you enough time and aggravation to justify updating your scanning hardware.
