By David Wallace

Expense reporting and retyping details from countless business cards collected at various conferences and conventions is enough to make anyone stay home. Those chores get easier with a portable scanner—it's like having an on-call intern to handle the grunt work. And recent models enable data to be "understood" and generate reports for reimbursements even before your return flight lands.

Scanners from SnapScan, Epson or Neat Receipts use your computer's USB port for power and data transfer. And since the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies will accept electronic copies, you can recycle, burn or shred the original paper.

"We add less than one pound of weight and the slim device adds a lot of power without a lot of bulk," says Jeff Vogel, marketing director of Neat Receipts. "We're helping people clean their desks not only in the office but on the road."

Neat Receipts touts its "Scanalizer" software that recognizes names, numbers or categories and inserts the data in searchable documents, also permitting export to the appropriate software. The next improvement, Vogel says, is the ability to use pre-formatted reports in Microsoft Excel or other software to automatically map information to templates in Word, Excel, and Outlook.

CardScan built a strong reputation for taking business card data and importing details to customer relationship management packages such as Outlook, Act!, Goldmine or Smartphone software—but it has no compatibility with Apple computers.

You may want applications such as direct-to-PDF scanning, keyword search within stored documents or other capabilities.

Being so organized will surely mean you have a chance to relax and spend some online "quality time" doing more important things like checking emails, catching game scores and finding local restaurants and iPass hotspots.