We create a remarkable amount of information digitally: spreadsheets, software documentation, receipts, financial records, even baby's first PhotoShop image, and that's just the beginning of what for most people is a gargantuan data mountain. But a huge amount of that information is still on ephemeral paper: business cards, boxes on a grocery store shelf, tattered restaurant receipts, photos, brainstormed ideas scribbled on a white board, or otherwise trapped in the durable and sometimes difficult to access physical universe. If you need to capture that data or image for posterity—or at least for your tax records—you probably need a scanner.
Your first thought might be to purchase a standalone scanner or choose an "all-in-one" or multi-function printer that includes scan-and-fax features. That makes sense when the workload is heavy, frequent, and concerns material that can be easily passed through a printer's feed mechanisms (so primarily separate, letter-sized pages). A high-end scanner gives you precise control over image resolution, image correction, and high-speed super-accurate optical character recognition (OCR) usually along with a fast paper feeding mechanism. That's appropriate if you have a two-foot stack of important legal proceedings to turn into text for analysis or you were given five banker's boxes of family slides to import into an online photo album [this last is true].
But for casual scans, scans of items not easily passed through a printer-style device, such as design plans drawn on a whiteboard, and perhaps most importantly, scans that need to be done "in the wild" like capturing a brainstorming session off a white board on the fly, you no longer need a full-on desktop scanner. Want to save grandma's recipe before it's lost? Share a long excerpt from an old Analog magazine without typing it in by hand? Capture travel receipt data? There is, indeed, an application for that. And, as it turns out, the camera you have handy is the best one to use, and that means the astonishingly capable one bundled into your smartphone. The availability of a mobile scanning app that runs off your smartphone and utilizes your phonecam to snap the initial scan image can encourage you not only to capture more information, but also to properly parse and leverage it later.
Fortunately, the apps to choose from are amazingly good. We tested four standalone mobile scanning apps—Evernote Scannable, Intsig CamScanner, Abbyy FineScanner, and Shoeboxed—in addition to the mobile scanning features built into Google Drive and Dropbox Business. You're sure to find one that matches your needs.
Our Editors' Choices are Abbyy FineScanner and Evernote Scannable. Abbyy FineScanner primarily because of the superior quality of its text recognition and the happily-persnickety amount of control it gives for the actual scanning process. It takes a while to get the hang of its user interface, but the results justify the investment. Evernote got the EC nod because of its slick interface and deep integration with not only its Evernote parent app but also competing data storage services such as Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive.
That said, however, it's hard to make a bad choice in this category, because even the free versions scan images quickly and accurately. But it's important to match up your needs to the right app, because each puts more emphasis on one or another feature.
As Far as the Eye Can Scan
The key issues are the type of documents you want to capture, where you want to save or share them (such as in the cloud), and what kind of post-processing you need (such as recognizing the text on the page and turning it into a Microsoft Word document). In every case, you can scan an image, such as a restaurant receipt, and save it in a common form, such as PDF or a JPEG image.
If your primary need is to turn scanned images into editable text, look for advanced OCR features. For example, when Abbyy FineScanner captures the pages of an open book, it separates the two pages and straightens them before analyzing the text. If you intend to capture text as PDF, consider whether those need to be encrypted files (which Intsig CamScanner, for example, supports).
Also consider where documents should end up. Apps you already use will influence your choice of scanning app. Most of the apps can save the images in the cloud, but Shoeboxed is integrated with a large selection of other web services, such as Intuit QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Salesforce.
Some mobile scanning apps assume that you want to do everything on your phone. Surely that's true, sometimes, and the smartphone camera certainly makes for a fast way to capture the image. But the scanned image (and text) has to be stored somewhere, and that's where the tools diverge. For example, some apps (such as Abbyy FineScanner) assume you'd like to keep the results in a cloud storage app such as Dropbox. Others have a service of their own for organization and further processing, such as Evernote, Intsig CamScanner, and Shoeboxed. I found the latter more convenient to work with, but you may feel otherwise.
You can scan a receipt in any of these apps, but their focus is on the scanning rather than what you do with the document afterwards. If the purpose of collecting receipts is to get the expenses reimbursed check out the apps in our expense tracking roundup, in which all the apps depend heavily on mobile scanning as part of the data collection process. For solo entrepreneurs who just want to capture information for their own records, those apps may be overkill. In that case consider Shoeboxed, which scans receipts without a "get reimbursed" process, and also makes it easy to scan business cards and track mileage.
In some cases, scanning is one of many product features. Evernote, for instance, has a limited scanning function included as part of its base service. This is in addition to the Evernote Scannable app reviewed as part of this roundup as do both Google Drive and Dropbox Business.
Beyond Image Capture
With each app, I scanned text in various forms, such as a recipe printed in Courier, prose from an open book, business cards, restaurant receipts, and a restaurant menu. I also evaluated how the apps managed handwritten pages, photos, a crumpled newspaper story with a photo, and signatures. I did scans in low light. I considered the quality of the OCR (when it was offered), the file formats supported, and the options for saving documents (such as to a Google Drive or a Dropbox account).
The user interfaces vary widely, and I encourage you to experiment with the free versions (when available, and most are). For example, you might decide it's important to tag images as you scan them, such as by category (travel receipt, office supplies) or project (Client A). The ease-of-use for this feature is all over the map, from "meh" (Abbyy FineScanner) to ready-for-the-accounting program (Shoeboxed). But sometimes they make up for it in other areas.
Don't expect immediate text recognition, either. By and large, the files are uploaded to the vendor to perform the OCR, whereupon they save the file wherever you indicated at the time of scanning or in your preferences. That's mainly because accurate OCR is a CPU-intensive task and the silicon in most smartphones plays Sling Blade to the average server's Real Genius. That makes for much more accurate OCR results, but often represents up to a 24-hour delay between the time you performed the scan and the time you've got a complete, OCRed version of the document. When you get immediate gratification on text recognition, meaning your phone is most likely performing the OCR operation itself, there's generally a noticeable tradeoff in quality and accuracy, as with Intsig CamScanner.
Also, consider whether you need to do anything with or to the actual image, such as sign a document (Dropbox Business is excellent at this), add a watermark or date, or draw a big fat X across a drawing (Intsig CamScanner is the winner).
This is a product category in which your functional needs define what's best for you, rather than one vendor's excellence in a particular area. Dropbox Business and Google Drive offer mobile app scanning as a minor plus, and if you use those services you certainly should take advantage of them. Though the best data storage service-to-scanning app integration we saw was still Editors' Choice winner Evernote Scannable.
However, if you want top-quality OCR, head right to our other Editors' Choice Abbyy FineScanner. If you primarily want to scan and track receipts, Shoeboxed has several features to support you. Intsig CamScanner's good for tagging documents, password-protecting them, and sharing them—but its OCR quality is so disappointing that I'd recommend it primarily for image management rather than converting those images to text.