Life would be easier if you could run your business from wherever you are.
Running your entire business from your phone without compromising on features or ease of use seems like an impossibility. However, in an increasingly fast-paced business culture, few successful business owners can operate their businesses while tethered to their office desk. Many must find ways to work while they’re away from the office.
Fortunately, small business owners are now living in a time of virtual riches. There is an abundance of productivity and business mobile apps that can help you run your business remotely. Many of these apps are free or inexpensive.
Here are ten terrific mobile apps that you should consider using. If we missed your favorite app, share it in the comments and let us know how it helps you run your business.
Full Contact
Full Contact takes the traditional address book and builds on it, turning it into something even more useful.
After you’ve added your contacts to the service (which runs on iOS, Android, and in your web browser) the service spins into action. It ferrets out duplicate contacts and data, scours the web and social media to fill in gaps, and gathers valuable information about your contacts.
Want to be able to make a note that one of your employees is celebrating his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary next week? How about impressing a client by wishing her a happy birthday? Full Contact makes keeping those kinds of notes easy.
This information gives you a broader picture of the people you interact with and is valuable for keeping everything you might need to know about someone on hand. You can then sync that information to different services and devices, giving you a robust, centralized location for all of your contact information. You no longer need to be tied to a rolodex or your notes at the office.
Full Contact’s basic features are available free, with affordable subscriptions unlocking advanced features like business card scanning and real-time sync.
Gusto
Until recently, taking care of payroll, benefits, and other HR-related tasks from a mobile phone was a challenge. This has changed with the rise of cloud-based services like Gusto, which handles much of the administrative work that traditionally required dedicated HR departments.
Small and medium sized business owners operating without a big HR team will find Gusto invaluable. Gusto helps you to manage all kinds of administrative work, including any employee scheduling and payroll tasks. It also helps you price and manage health insurance, 401(k) plans, and other benefits.
Gusto starts at $39 per month and $6 per employee you manage with the service, so it’s a cost-effective option for maintaining administrative sanity. We love Gusto and use it at crowdSPRING.
Quickbooks
Quickbooks has been around for a long time. How long? So long that its original release back in the 1980s actually ran on MS-DOS, proving itself as a staple for business owners of all kinds.
Its latest incarnation, Quickbooks Online, is a cloud-based service providing small business owners with robust accounting and cash flow management. There is even a freelance option with specific features aimed at independent workers and other self-employed consultants.
Pricing for Quickbooks starts at $10 a month for the freelance edition and scales up to $40 a month for the top tier option. If that’s a little too pricey for you, you’ll often see 50% off specials.
Slack
There is a seemingly endless flood of apps and services out there to help you and your employees stay in contact, but one of the biggest and most beloved is Slack.
With an easy to use interface and playful features (I’m looking at you, Slackbot), it’s no surprise that Slack is catapulting through the charts for business owners of all kinds. Here at crowdSPRING, we love Slack, and find it’s an especially valuable tool for our team.
A surprising variety of businesses and organizations use Slack for real-time chat, file sharing, and audio/video calls. Take the Hartford, Connecticut police department, who use Slack to “track and share intelligence regarding felonies and pattern crimes.” Bet you never knew Slack was a crime-fighting superhero.
Slack’s feature-rich free package might be all you need, but there are also paid tiers starting at $7 a month per user. Paid features include archives of all messages, group video and audio calls, screen sharing, and more.
Todoist
Staying on top of your to-do list is a challenge every small business owner knows all too well, but thanks to cloud-based apps like Todoist, organizational nirvana is not far away.
Todoist is the most well-rounded task organizer available. It boasts an impressive list of features and support for devices across more than 10 different platforms, making it accessible and functional for small business owners and big business owners alike.
Todoist helps you:
- Create tasks and assign them to specific projects,
- Create reminders based on time or location,
- Create labels to organize across projects,
- Allow for comments and file attachments on any given task,
- Delegate projects and tasks to other subscribers.
Todoist’s basic features are free to use, with a $39 yearly subscription opening up a number of powerful add-ons, like location-based reminders and project templates. If you’re in need of organizational hand holding – hey, did you remember where you left the keys? – Todoist might just be the app you’ve been searching for.
Tripcase
Travel organizer app Tripcase describes itself as “a single place for all of your trips.” It provides travelers with features that make travel easier, including:
- managing itineraries,
- hotel bookings,
- rental car reservations,
- flight change notifications, and
- airport terminal and gate information.
Tripcase makes adding flights easy by creating new itineraries from forwarded flight confirmation emails. It also lets you share trips with others so they can receive notifications of trip changes. It’s available online and for iOS and Android.
The majority of Tripcase’s features are free, but access to its expense and receipt tracking feature requires a $6 yearly subscription fee. If you and your business are, well, going places, Tripcase is a good thing to pack along.
Adobe Scan
Creative software veteran Adobe recently tossed its hat into the crowded “use your phone as a scanner” ring with their release of the aptly-named Adobe Scan.
As the name suggests, Adobe Scan lets you turn photos of documents, whiteboards, and other “analog platforms” into high-quality PDFs. It also features powerful text recognition that turns your scans into searchable, selectable text, and provides cloud storage for your files via their Creative Cloud product.
Business owners of all kinds can save time and energy otherwise spent hanging over a clunky scanner by expediting an otherwise tedious job. Adobe Scan is a free app and available for iOS and Android devices.
Evernote
Thanks to Adobe Scan, you can have a virtual stack of scanned documents piling up in your digital workspace. This can get out of hand fast, so once you’ve scanned your documents, organize them (and lots of other file types) with Evernote.
Evernote is one of the first “everything bucket” apps, and even though there have been a number of high-profile competitors (including Google Keep and Microsoft’s OneNote), Evernote’s cross-platform support and reliable sync are hard to beat.
Evernote’s free tier caps monthly uploads to a total of 60mb with up to two synced devices, but yearly subscriptions starting at $47 are available if you need more.
Dropbox
If you were looking for other options to store your files, no list of essential apps would be complete without mentioning Dropbox. It burst onto the online scene in 2007 and hasn’t looked back, amassing over 500 million users.
Dropbox creates a special file folder on your computer that syncs those files across any number of devices, making your files available wherever you are. It has apps available for most major platforms, including iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and more.
Jill Duffy of PC Magazine says:
Dropbox is among the simplest and most elegant cloud storage and file-syncing services. It gives you access to your files from nearly anywhere. You can install Dropbox on virtually any computer or mobile device. Dozens of apps integrate easily with Dropbox, too, making it highly versatile.
Dropbox’s free plan gives you 5 GB of storage to work with, which you can increase up to 16 GB by referring people to the service. Their “plus” tier raises that to 1 TB for $10 a month, and there are additional team and business plans available as well. We love Dropbox, and use it at crowdSPRING.
IFTTT
Think of IFTTT (short for “If this, then that”) as a magical connector for your apps and services. As the name implies, it allows you to connect your services together by doing “that” when “this” occurs.
Confused? Here’s an example: You can create an applet (a very small application performing one or a few simple functions) that automatically saves any images you upload to Evernote straight to your Dropbox account. You can set your home lighting system to turn off once you get to work. Did you recently publish a new WordPress blog post? Set it up so that IFTTT tweets it for you, pushing traffic to your site. The possibilities aren’t endless, but they are pretty long.
IFTTT is an incredibly powerful service that is surprisingly easy to use, with hundreds of pre-made recipes to choose from. IFTTT is free to use and available online, with clients for iOS and Android.
Running a business can be an overwhelming thing. Using available technology to make your business run smoothly and efficiently can make an otherwise stressful prospect into something well organized and functional. With so many useful and low-cost services available to help you, there has never been a better time to be a business owner.
Now you have the tools, but what if you don’t have the business? If you’re ready to become an entrepreneur but aren’t sure where to start, take a look at our free e-book STAND OUT: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Starting, Growing, and Managing a Successful Business.
