Business travelers are mostly staying home right now, but it's time to start thinking about getting equipped to go back on the road. The RapidReceipt RR-70W ($259.99)—a member of Epson’s new RapidReceipt line of receipt and document scanners—is high on the packing list. It's a manual-sheetfed portable document scanner designed for capturing financial data and other documents. It's similar in concept and features to Epson's WorkForce ES-65RW Portable Document Scanner—Accounting Edition, and like the ES-65RW, ships with the valuable ScanSmart Accounting Edition add-on to Epson’s ScanSmart software. Highly accurate, dependable, extremely compact, and light, it's also wireless and comes with a built-in battery, allowing it to operate sans cabling. All these features make the RR-70W our latest top pick in its class.
Ready to Hit the Road
One of three receipt scanners that Epson is releasing this year, the RR-70W is positioned second in the lineup. The flagship is the RR-600W, a sheetfed desktop scanner. Coming in third is the RR-60, another portable that's less expensive than the RR-70W but lacks Wi-Fi and a battery.
Portable document scanners come in two distinct flavors: single-sheet models, like the RR-70W, and multipage models with automatic document feeders (ADFs) that can scan several pages all in one go. If you need a multipage sheetfed scanner intended for accounting use, Epson's WorkForce ES-300WR Wireless Document Scanner—Accounting Edition is a good option.
Aside from the RR-70W's wireless functionality and battery, it's a fairly simple device similar in appearance to Epson's DS-80W, another PCMag favorite. It measures about 1.5 by 10.7 by 2 inches (HWD) and weighs 11 ounces. That’s smaller and lighter than most manual-sheetfed portables, especially those with batteries. The Editors’ Choice–winning Brother DSmobile DS-940DW, for instance, is about half an inch higher, an inch wider, and more than twice as heavy.
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To initiate a scan, you feed one- or two-sided pages into the slot on the front. Both sides of two-sided documents are scanned simultaneously, and you feed receipts, business cards, credit cards, and other narrow items at the far-left end of the slot, as designated by the icon located there.
Though the RR-70W does come with a small control panel, its purpose is primarily to choose display status and connection types. You'll use ScanSmart to handle everything else, including scanning resolution and file destination.
Across the top-right end there’s a Start/Stop toggle and a small LED that displays several status lights, including Automatic Feeding mode, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi AP (access point status), Battery, and Error. Further right of the LED you’ll find a Ready status light.
The Wi-Fi switch (for toggling between Wi-Fi and USB, the RR-70W's only two connectivity options) resides on the right-front edge next to the Wi-Fi Connect button (for connecting through Wi-Fi Protected Setup, or WPS) and the Power button. On the right end cap, you’ll find a mini-USB port for charging and data.
Powerful Accounting Software to Manage Receipts
Epson’s modular scanner interface, ScanSmart, controls the scanner itself, configures and executes scan jobs, and creates workflow profiles (scan to email, scan to file, and so on) that Epson calls actions. The ScanSmart Accounting Edition module simplifies collecting data from scanned financial documents and getting it into your bookkeeping and financial applications.
The Accounting Edition is essentially a ScanSmart module called Receipt Manager that automatically identifies and extracts financial data from invoices, receipts, and other hardcopy financial documents. You can then massage and export the data into files compatible with QuickBooks, QuickBooks Online, Quicken, TurboTax, or Excel. The Excel export is CSV, a universal data format accepted by most financial programs. According to Epson, as you use ScanSmart, it learns how to identify recurring data such as logos, vendor names, and frequent expenses, further automating the storing, retrieving, and searching of financial information.
The downloadable bundle also includes Nuance Power PDF, a PDF creation and editing program, and Nuance PDF Converter for Mac.
You can scan to your Android or iOS smartphone or tablet via Wi-Fi, but you’ll have to use one of Epson’s mobile interfaces. ScanSmart does not run on handhelds.
Fast and Accurate
Frankly, our scanner speed tests weren’t really designed for timing these little single-sheet scanners. Due to the human factor involved in feeding pages to these machines one at a time, coming up with an empirically accurate scanning speed isn't really possible. The RR-70W does have an Automatic Feeding Mode that takes each new sheet from you, rather than you having to feed it in under the rollers manually. This may not sound like much, but it does help getting each page started. However, it's not comparable to an ADF.
That said, Epson rates the RR-70W at 4 seconds per page, or 15 pages per minute (ppm). I tested it over USB 2.0 using Epson ScanSmart on PCMag's standard Intel Core i5-equipped testbed PC running Windows 10 Professional.
The RR-70W did manage to scan single pages, even two-sided ones, in around 4 seconds each. As long as I sat there, poised and ready to diligently feed each page as the preceding one finished scanning, I was able to push through about 14.2 one-sided pages per minute and 28.6 two-sided images per minute (or ipm, where each image is a page side).
These scores were very similar to most of the manual-sheetfed scanners I’ve tested over the past year or so. The Brother DSmobile DS-940DW, for example, managed 13.5ppm and 27ipm, and Epson’s ES-65WR Wireless Portable Scanner—Accounting Edition was, at 11.9ppm and 23.8ipm, a little slower (but then I could have been having an off day).
The test scores were influenced by how efficiently I kept the scanner fed, but what I can say for sure is that not once during my tests did I have to wait for the software to catch up. The scanned text was digitized as quickly as the PC received it.
Also critical to the process is how accurately the optical character recognition (OCR) software converted the scanned text to editable text. The RR-70W fell in line with most of Epson’s other portable scanners, converting both of our Arial and Times New Roman font tests error-free down to 6 points. It’s possible to score a little better than this, but very few receipts or documents will contain text that small, so it's unlikely to come up during ordinary use.
I also tested how well the Accounting Edition ScanSmart add-on scanned, recognized, gleaned, and exported data. For the most part, the scans and OCR were accurate, though how easily the software massages the data into your financial program depends a lot on what programs you use. The compatibility with QuickBooks and Quicken, for example, is relatively seamless, and ScanSmart fills the allotted fields accurately. When exporting to CSV format, you may have to open the files in Excel and do a little field matching, but once I got it all set up correctly, the process worked well enough, with very little need for error corrections.
A Business Traveler's Best Friend
If you don’t see yourself capturing stacks of receipts or other multipage documents, plunking down an additional $100 or more for a multipage-sheetfed portable like Epson’s WorkForce ES-300WR may not be a sensible choice. A manual-sheetfed, such as the RR-70W, may well be better suited to your needs.
This little beauty is light, compact, and easy to take with you. It's truly wireless thanks to its battery and Wi-Fi. It's relatively fast and accurate, and you'll get a real boost from the included software's capable OCR and ability to categorize data. As a fine example of a manual-sheetfed portable receipt and document scanner, the RR-70W is a worthy Editors’ Choice recipient.
The Epson RR-70W portable receipt and document scanner is a fast, accurate, and feature-rich lightweight machine designed for scanning on the road.
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Sign up for other newslettersAbout William Harrel
Former Contributing Editor
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