Epson's Rapid Receipt RR-600W
I’m in a heated race with Google. The company recently announced that starting June 1, it will begin charging for its storage that your Google account uses up above and beyond the free 15GB of space. There’s one thing going in your favor, if you act now: Any photo or video that you put in there before June will not count toward the 15GB threshold. So I’m currently scanning all of my printed photos and uploading these digital treasures into the convenient online service that I can quickly and easily access from anywhere.
At the same time, I’m working on my taxes. As a result, I’ve been scanning a box full of receipts and paperwork from 2020 — organizing them into something respectable that I can hand to my accountant. Nothing like waiting til the last minute, I know.
Anyway, I found one machine that can handle both of these jobs masterfully and quickly: Epson’s brand-new RapidReceipt RR-600W Wireless Duplex Receipt and Color Document Scanner ($500). There’s so much I like about this small desktop machine. Where to start? Well, it has a 4.3-inch color touchscreen with super-easy instructions. You can connect it by cable or wirelessly to a laptop, or wire-free to a smartphone or Chromebook. You actually don’t even need a computer to use it. You can stick a USB stick into its built-in slot and scan instantly to the thumb drive — eliminating the need for any networks. Or you can just use it on its own and beeline documents, photos and receipts right to one of your cloud storage services like Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. I’ve only used a couple of competing products, but I think Epson makes the process of pairing its scanner with your online devices and services the easiest. The interface is intuitive. Plus, its machines are great at handling various sizes of papers all in the same batch. And it’s relatively quiet all along the way.
The machine comes with accounting software that dishes your unorganized receipts and invoices into categorized formats — accurately exporting any data via the software’s receipt manager — and integrates all into the likes of QuickBooks, Excel and TurboTax. Plus, the PDF files are searchable and editable. And you can load up to 100 sheets into its auto feeder. If you want, you can set it to scan both sides of each page, in color or black-and-white. It can scan as fast as 35 pages per minute, depending on the resolution you set. There’s also software that will convert business card scans and plant that information into your contact software.
After I’m done scanning everything I need to, I’ll probably just tuck the Epson away in a closet until next tax season. And the nice thing is, it weighs just eight pounds and takes up a small footprint of 6.9 by 11.8 by 6.6 inches. That size doesn’t include the built-in receiving tray that you can manually extend out to collect pages as they get scanned. Good things do indeed come in small packages.
