The Neat Company Forums

The files that are 'synced' to a folder have completely unusable names, such as NEAT 06A3E288-AA75-458A-A51A-5DC150E51DF6.pdf.  Is there any way to have these named in a useful manner?  Currently If I have a collection with 20-30 receipts, I have to open every one of them to find the correct one to attach to a specific line item on an expense report.  Can't really pass them on to my admin either, as they have no meaning without opening each one.

 

Any ideas? 

I second this as an enhancement. 

I threw together a simple workflow that will do the job for you. You can download it from here:

<http://www.trivectus.com/Downloads/temp/RenameNEATReceiptSensibly.zip>

Deflate the zip archive, then place the application it contains into:

~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Folder Actions/

Create any folders in the path that don't already exist. Then, configure the newly installed workflow as a Folder Action on the folder where you save the receipt PDFs (right-click, or control-click, on the folder, and you'll see the appropriate menu commands). Now, when a receipt is saved into that folder, it will automatically be renamed. For example, I just did a test where this:

985A78A8-C370-4489-BAF4-19BB187405E7.pdf

became this:

NEAT Receipt-The Melting Pot Thu Mar 20 2008 $141.59.pdf

If you prefer to do things manually in batches, here's another version:

<http://www.trivectus.com/Downloads/temp/RenameSelectedNEATReceiptsSensibly.zip>

Install this one to:

~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder/

Again, create the path folders as necessary. Then just select a bunch of PDF receipts in the Finder, right-click (or control-click) on them, and select the rename script from the Automator menu. The PDF files will all be renamed right in place, and any non-PDF files that are selected will be ignored.

I'll leave these posted for a while to give folks a chance to grab 'em. Hopefully, NR itself will come through in the not-too-distant future with a baked-in solution.

BTW, I've only tested these under 10.5; I have no idea whether they'll work under 10.4. At the very least, they're quite unlikely to cause any harm under 10.4; they just may not work. (Of course, please make sure you're working only with data that you can restore, no matter what OS you're using!)

Hope this helps some of you....

This is a fantastic tool, but I'm having trouble getting it to work. I'm not very familiar with automator, so that's what's holding me up. Would you be willing to explain it a little more for me so I can get this to work? I'm running 10.5.4.

Well, I can try... can you tell me more specifically what you've done and where you're having trouble?

Well, it looks like this is no longer needed as of 1.1. I don't remember seeing the change documented (though I've not looked at the release docs recently), but when I dragged a receipt out as a test, I got a file with this name: "Receipt-Costco Gas Mon Sep 22 2008 $78.14.pdf".

I figured out the issue- you have to open these scripts in Automator, then go to Save As Plug In... then select Finder or Folder action depending on which one you are using.

 

Question- how do we edit these scripts?  My automator/applescript knowledge is decent, I don't know how to get into the script to change a couple things.

 Also, I don't see where 1.1 fixed this issue- I still have ugly names with 1.1.4.

 

Thanks for your experimentation on this!

This is only fixed for drag'n'drop exporting, not the library folder sync.  Glad they've got the right idea with the dragged receipts though, it's a start.

hunterhicks:

Question- how do we edit these scripts?

Just double-click the file to open it in Automator; you should see the actions listed and available to be edited. I'm just using the Apple-supplied rename action right now; if you wanted, you could instead write a separate AppleScript script or shell script to do something fancier and then call that instead. In fact, my first version did use a shell script for greater flexibility, but in the end, I opted for the simplicity of Apple's Automator action.