by Monna Eve Senara
Due to increased functionality and convenience, smartphones have evolved to being more than just a means for communication. The multitude of applications it stores has effectively displaced many of our traditional tools for everyday life from alarm clocks to televisions, and even desktop computers.
Equipped with the right kind of apps, smartphones can become powerful tools that help boost productivity and success.
Here is a list of useful and clever apps that can help you with daily tasks when running your business.
For Business Trips
Some businessmen travel for meetings, signing of contracts, sales, conferences, and other important reasons. Here are some apps that can make business trips a little more hassle-free.
One of the most convenient ways to plan your travels is through Hipmunk with its wide coverage of hotels, flights, and trains. It allows you to compare prices and details across Amtrak, Airbnb, and Homeaway sites.
It has a navigable interface that gives a clear picture of your choices. Flight results are presented in a visual chart that includes layovers, duration, and prices. It also has a heatmap feature that tells you of accommodations that are located close to shopping centers or establishments.
Glympse on the hand is a map and travel app that lets you share your location to selected people; inform a client that you’re on your way to your meeting; and also track the whereabouts of your team. It also has a business version wherein your customers can track the location of the delivery packages they are expecting. This transparency feature can help ease worries for customers, and aid you in winning their trust and gaining their patronage.
To-Do Lists
Entrepreneurs always have a full plate everyday, so they need to-do lists to remind them of things they need to accomplish.
Wunderlist lets you arrange your tasks, appointments, assignments and reminders in a clear and organized way. It allows you to collaborate with friends or team members on a particular task or project.
Its new features include the Smart Due Dates, which automatically fills in dates with keywords like “tomorrow” or “next month.” The app also alerts you about your overdue tasks with a badge icon, which will press you to get the work done.
Aside from Wunderlist, Carrot can help you organize your to-do lists but it comes with a rewarding twist! It mixes fun and functionality by providing consequences depending on if you fail or succeed. Unique rewards such as cute sayings or virtual fortune cookies await a job well done. However, if you fail to get things done, it will shower you with insults and spiteful judgments.
Project Management
Team unity and communication are always at the heart of each project’s success. These project management apps are designed to help your teams achieve exactly just that.
Wrike allows real-time collaboration for teams. It does not only track your tasks but also help you accomplish them. It lets you assign tasks to and communicate with team members. Its newest feature, Wrike Reports, gathers the latest and most accurate project and member statuses and reports them through a visual, easy-to-digest format. It gives project leaders quick and substantial insight into the development of a particular project and what each member is up to.
Another project management app, WorkFront ensures that you optimize work and time in both your teams and company as a whole. It allows company-wide visibility and coverage of entire work processes from the handling of job requests to their completion. It is especially designed for enterprise teams that cover projects from IT to marketing and leadership.
File Storage and Conversion
Among all the file storage apps available today, Box offers some of the best features for business users. Users can apply high-security options, set an automatic expiration date, and access up to 25 previous versions of the files. Additionally, the higher Box tier you choose, the more beneficial it will be for you. Added features include more user roles with varied permissions, external authentication of files, audit logging, and more.
PDF is one of the most convenient file formats to access a myriad of information.
The Tiny Scanner Pro is a unique app that can give you the PDF that you need for your files and data especially when you’re on the go. The app allows you to scan anything — contracts, flyers, business cards– and transform them into a PDF with high quality grayscale and black-and-white details. It can also be integrated with your Dropbox, another file storage app, where you can instantly upload and share your files to anyone in your company, or your clients and business acquaintances.
Storage of Contacts
As entrepreneurs, you will always be meeting new people as you network and conduct business with them. Thus, you need to manage your contacts and remember them as well. This is where Humin comes in.
Humin stores your contacts and helps you remember their names with a search tool that makes use of particular keywords such as “Lives in New York” or “Met last week.” It combines information from contacts in your phone, Facebook, LinkedIn, calendar, email, and voicemail, and returns results based on those simple keywords. It points you to that particular person along with his or her relevant information.
Finances
Financial management is crucial in any business. Luckily there are apps that can let you keep tabs on your money flow as well as your transactions with customers.
The Expense Manager can help you handle your finances through its wide array of diverse tools. The app allows recording, sorting, and tracking of business’ expenses with a clear and visual interface. It also generates graphs of your money flow with detailed statistics and useful insights on your finances.
Aside from managing your business’s finances, the mode of payment of customers is also another financial concern. For Square, no business is too small to accept credit cards whether you’re still starting or already scaling up. With just an app in your iPhone or android, you can already process credit card transactions. Square provides a free card reader that connects to your smartphone, which instantly transforms it into a mobile credit card machine for your business. Users have the option to deduct 2.75% with every card swipe or pay $275 per month for service charge.
If you’re always on the go, these apps will help boost productivity by allowing you to accomplish tasks anytime and anywhere. What other apps are you using that are not on this list?
