Open an old Neat database without Neat

If Neat 5 won't install on your new PC, or Neat for Mac stopped opening after an upgrade, your receipts are almost certainly still in the database files. The software is the part that's gone. Getting the documents back out with their vendor, date and amount is the hard bit, and that's what this page is about.

Why the old software won't run

Neat's own support page lays it out. "Effective July 31st, 2018, all support for Legacy Desktop Software versions ended", which covers Neat 5.7 and earlier on Windows and Neat for Mac 4.5 and earlier. The downloads have been withdrawn. Since October 2019, fresh installs on Windows fail because Microsoft removed the Visual C++ 2005 and 2008 packages they depend on. And since August 2023 a Windows update "now refuses to recognize apps signed that long ago. As a result, users will not be able to install or run the Neat Legacy software on a Windows 10 or 11 device."

On the Mac, "Neat Legacy software for Mac is not compatible with Mac OSX 10.15 Catalina or newer OSs."

The same page warns that if the old software "crashes or stops working, there will be no way to recover any of the data stored there". That's true of Neat's tools. The files themselves are still readable, as below.

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If an old computer still runs Neat

Do these before anything else breaks. They're all from Neat's help pages.

1. Make a backup

   On Windows, quit Neat and copy the whole Neat Data folder, which is in Documents by default, to a USB drive. Inside Neat, Tools > Database > Offline Backup also makes a single backup file ending in .nbak (Neat's backup guide). On a Mac, copy Neat Library.nrmlib from Documents.

2. Export to PDF

   On Windows, select a folder or some items, then Export, choose PDF, and pick Selected item(s) or Selected folder. "Sub-folders will not be included when exporting to PDF so must be exported separately" (Neat's export guide), so go folder by folder. On a Mac, dragging items out of the running app keeps your folders.

3. Or move it into Neat's cloud

   The old app can sync into Neat's current service, which is $200 a year. The sync runs from inside the old software, "requires a current active cloud plan to work", and Neat says it "may need to be re-enabled by our support team" (migration guide). So this only helps while the old app still starts.

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If all you have are the files

Windows (Neat 5, NeatWorks)

Look in Documents for the Neat Data folder. FileInfo says it should hold "at least three files", "a Neatworks NWDB file, an image NWDB file, and a cabinet NWCAB file" (FileInfo), and Neat shows an error if one is missing, so keep them together.

There is a do-it-yourself route. "An NWDB file is actually a SQL Server Compact Edition (SQLCE) database", says FileInfo, just with a different extension. People in the long comment thread on DocumentSnap's Neat post have renamed a copy from .nwdb to .sdf and opened it with SQL Server Compact tools. One used CompactView, a free viewer that needs .NET Framework 4 and a SQL Server Compact runtime. Another reported, "All the data was there but not pretty. Each record was a database item." Always work on a copy.

That gets you rows in tables. It doesn't give you the receipts as PDFs, and matching each scan to its vendor and amount by hand is slow work.

Mac (Neat for Mac, NeatWorks for Mac)

Your library is Neat Library.nrmlib, in Documents by default, with an orange filing cabinet icon. Spotlight finds it if you type .nrmlib. Neat's recovery steps: Control-click the library, choose Show Package Contents, and copy the PDFs out to a folder of your own. Neat says this works "even if the software is corrupt, broken, or cannot be opened" (Mac export guide).

The catch: "Any metadata (customized categories, notes, folders & etc) will not export to your files." You get the scans with Neat's file names and lose the vendor, date, amount and folder for each one. Those details aren't gone, though. An old open-source project read them from a file inside the package, so they're probably still sitting in yours.

Why it's worth getting them out

In Canada the CRA says "you must keep all required records and supporting documents for a period of six years from the end of the last tax year they relate to" (CRA), and electronic records have to be kept "in an electronic readable format" (CRA). In the US the IRS's general rule is three years, but six if you left out income worth more than 25% of the gross income on your return, seven for bad debts or worthless securities, and at least four for employment tax records (IRS).

IN DEVELOPMENT

What I'm building

A tool that reads the Neat files directly, with no Neat software, and writes out every document as a PDF, filed in folders that match the ones you had, plus one spreadsheet (CSV and Excel) with the vendor, date, amount, category, notes and PDF file name for each receipt. It's meant for Windows Neat 5 databases and Mac Neat libraries.

You'd start with a free scan that opens your files and says how many documents and receipts it found and which years they cover, so you know it can read them before you pay. My guess at the price is about US$49 per database, one-off. The plan is for it to run in your browser, so your receipts are never uploaded.

It isn't ready. The Mac side looks like the quicker one. The Windows format isn't documented, and if a browser can't read it reliably, the fallback is a small Windows program instead.

What would help most right now is a real Neat database to test against. If you have one you're willing to share, email jonathonwager@plaugstudios.com. I'd use it only for testing and delete it when you ask or when the tool is done.

Email address

Email me when it's ready

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One email when it's ready, nothing else. What this form stores.