Overall, I am growing to like to Mariner Paperless, but it is not perfect. While I like the fact that Paperless is usually very good (but not perfect) in scanning a receipt and recognizing the amounts, it does not always get the data correct, so you have to proofread the scan to make sure it is accurate. Nevertheless, that ability to scan your receipts and send the item (usually, not always, accurately) to a preset category alone makes Paperless a time-saving useful tool, especially since the program can display those scans in sortable columns that will display your scans by date, by category, by sub-category, by the number of pages scanned, or by size of scan. Additionally, if you scan via the Fujitsu ScanSnap sheet-fed scanner, as I do, then the document can be OCR-scanned so that the text can be later searched in Paperless.
However Paperless is marred by idiosyncrasies and a lack of features that do not seem congruent with standard Macintosh features that have been already proven to work on other programs, so I see no reason why Mariner’s coders do not implement such features in Paperless.
For example, if you scan a multiple-page document, and if some of the pages do not get scanned so that, when displayed in Paperless, they all show up with the page shown correctly, Paperless does not allow you to individually rotate a page to the left or to the right. When you click on the Rotate Left or Rotate Right buttons, which, by the way, have no associated short keys (another Mac interface oversight, it seems to me), the entire document gets shifted, not merely the individual page which you want to rotate. I find that rather inept.
Additonally, in regards to searching for text that you had OCR’d into during the scan, Paperless will accurately find all the instances of the scanned text, but, unlike, say Adobe Acrobat and other programs, which allow you to click on an arrow to move directly to the next or previous instance of that search term, Paperless provides no such feature. You must manually click on each page of the scanned document to locate the yellow highlighted search text on the subsequent pages in the document. Why it would not occur to Mariner’s managers and programmers to implement a feature that is proven to work in other programs baffles me, for it reduces the functionality of the program in my eyes.
Hence, while Paperless is a useful program and I enjoy using it, this program is far from “perfect” and could use some improvement. I suspect that the problem must stem from upper management’s attitudes, which is why so many of Mariner’s applications get reviewed as mediocre. The company seems concerned with putting out products which are designed to “get by” rather than to put out top quality work. Thus, they employ a marketing strategy which overprices their products, and they deluge you with “discounts” and bundles to see those products for significant percentages off: one should never pay full price for a Mariner software product.