Back at Macworld 2012, I was given a quick demo at the Neat booth about their then-upcoming service NeatCloud.
It was in beta during the Spring, and it looks like as of a few weeks ago, NeatCloud and NeatMobile are now live.
I will check the service out over the next few weeks, but since a number of people had asked me when it was coming, I thought I’d do a quick overview of the service now.
How It Works
If you have a NeatDesk or NeatReceipts scanner and scan your documents into the NeatWorks software, you can sign up for the NeatCloud service.
If you are a member, documents will be synchronized up to Neat’s servers.
From there, you can access your documents from another computer running NeatWorks, via the web, or from a mobile device (more on mobile devices later).
You don’t even need to scan with your Neat scanner. You can forward e-mails to NeatCloud or take pictures with your mobile device and send the image in. These will then be added to your NeatWorks library next time you sync.
NeatMobile
There is a related service called NeatMobile. If you have NeatMobile, you can access your documents through their mobile apps, and you can use your smartphone’s camera to “scan” documents into NeatCloud which will then synchronize. Your scans will then be OCR’ed.
As of the time of writing this, there are only iPhone and iPad apps, but apparently Android is coming “this summer”.
Security
Documents stored on Neat’s servers are encrypted with AES–256 encryption. Of course, whether you are comfortable keeping your stuff in the cloud is something only you can decide.
Pricing
If all you want to do is have your Neat documents stored online with web access, e-mail access, and OCR, it is $6 a month.
If you want to be able to use NeatMobile to access your files via the Neat apps, you’ll need the more expensive “Home & Office” plan which is $15. There’s a business plan too if you need more users and support.
There’s a 30 day trial so that you can see how you like it.
Whether that is expensive or not depends on how much value you’ll receive out of the extra features.
You can check out information on NeatCloud and NeatMobile here. If you are interested, it may be worth checking out their NeatCloud support area to see if people are having any recurring problems.
For you Neat users out there, what do you think of NeatCloud? Are you using it?