Whether you’re working on the road or busy in the office, these five useful apps can put your entire business at your fingertips.
Organisation is essential when you’ve got a hectic day ahead meeting clients, reviewing paperwork, preparing contracts and attending settlements. Your smartphone and tablet will prove invaluable – they’ll help you work seamlessly with your team and keep things on track. Here are five easy-to-use apps for businesses of any size.
Collate your notes
Evernote makes it easy to keep all your client notes in one place and share them with colleagues. Your team can then have discussions and give feedback within the app. This app is ideal for updating files on the road rather than waiting until you get back to the office. Everything is stored in the Cloud, so you can jump between your computer, smartphone and tablet and simply pick up where you left off.
You can also create multiple ‘notebooks’ within Evernote to manage different clients and properties. Each notebook can contain annotated documents, handwritten notes, maps, photos and audio clips. These can be tagged with keywords and location data, which is convenient when you’re working with property. It’s easy to keep contracts at hand, plus you can use your smartphone’s camera to scan documents and business cards with Evernote Scannable.
Meanwhile, popular Cloud-storage app Dropbox is perfect for securely sharing large files with clients and colleagues, rather than sending files as email attachments.
Organise your day
Toodledo is a flexible to-do list manager. It lets you create multiple to-do lists, plus you can collaborate with your team to manage joint to-do lists for each client and property. You can even assign tasks to other people’s lists and see when they’re completed, to ensure everything is in order before a client meeting. The app can sync all your lists in the Cloud so you can access them from your mobile, tablet and desktop. Toodledo also integrates with Google’s online calendar, which you can access via a desktop browser or the Google Calendar app to easily coordinate schedules, arrange meetings and invite participants.
Manage your time and money
Freckle is a powerful time-management tool for desktop and mobile devices; you’ll no longer have to wonder exactly how you spent your day. This app provides a simple way to monitor how much time you – and your team – work on each project or client. It can also track and report online time, mobile time and billable vs non-billable hours. Expensify takes the hassle out of reporting expenses, especially if you’re out of the office a lot. Using your smartphone, you can take photos of your receipts and directly submit expense reports.
Expensify then has back-end admin tools that make it easy for your financial team to approve your reimbursement. If you need to keep track of expense claims, you can set company rules and the app will ensure compliance.
Business-related apps can boost productivity, reduce turnaround times and help your team work closely during the lead-up to settlement. With the right apps, it’s much easier to stay in control when things get busy.
