Running a small business? That’s great. Do you want to run it even better?! Well let’s consult the technology oracles and see which business apps are hot right now.
1) Tripit
For the traveling business person this is an indispensable accompanying app. Available in both paid and free versions, Tripit takes out the guesswork from all your travels by automatically drawing travel related emails from your inbox, interpreting them, then creating an accurate and simplified day by day schedule detailing your trip for easy and quick viewing. You can quickly see all of your flight details as well as accommodation and furthermore each entry includes booking references, links to maps and all the relevant contact information. If you are paranoid and do not want Tripit crawling emails, you can just as easily forward all of your travel emails to a Tripit email address and this will then be updated on your trip schedule.
2) Expensify
Fading receipts stuffed into a wallet no more! Get on top of your expenses properly with this handy app. The brand catchphrase sums it up nicely – ‘you weren’t born to do expenses’. No, you probably weren’t. Using some advanced scanning camera technology, OCR has been employed to automatically translate and compile full expense reports ready for further purposes such as filing your business tax, allowing you to chuck the paper.
3) HelloSign
It’s hard to remember that not so long ago the act of signing business contracts, agreements and legal documents was the physical domain of personal meetings and insecure faxes. Nowadays you have options like HelloSign which offers secure, easy and incredibly quick signing and management of legally binding documentation. Through their products and API you can integrate and plugin to a variety of applications such as gmail and document management systems, making it a customisable and efficient solution to the common practice of signing agreements.
4) Zapier
Zapier is the glue that joins your other web apps together into insanely customisable workflows that will soothe almost any business issue. As they explain – “Easy automation for busy people. Zapier moves info between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work.’ So what are we talking about here? A link to Zapier has been established in a swathe of top shelf apps from Gmail to Dropbox to Slack, in fact the library is currently sitting at over 1000 apps currently available to link together. For example you can have a Slack sent to you with a summary of today’s Gmail messages or have new Dropbox files emailed to you automatically or send thank you emails and automated receipts the moment payments are received in Reckon One. The possible combinations and strings of flow on tasks are mind boggling so no matter your business you are guaranteed to find an automated time saving match made in heaven.
