In business you need to take advantage of anything that can give you the edge over your competition. One easy way is to make the most of technology.
Thankfully, there are countless apps on the market that are designed to make your business life more efficient and effective. What makes these apps really fantastic though is that they are absolutely free. Let’s take a look at five of the best.
Expensify
Do you travel a lot in the course of your business? Then you will know just how time-consuming it can be to ensure that you keep careful records of your expenses so that you can claim them back at the end of every month or quarter.
If you are still collecting piles of receipts and then putting them into an unwieldy spreadsheet then you’re in the dark ages, there are much better solutions!
One of these is Expensify, it really streamlines the whole expenses process. It’s so easy, every time you get a receipt you take a photo of it using the app and then throw your receipt away. The Expensify app automatically scans the image of your receipt and fills out the details (amount, company name, date etc.) and then at the end of the month you have a fully filled out expense report in seconds. It really does save you a huge amount of time and stress.
CRM Apps
If your business uses a CRM and it is one of the big names such as SalesForce, Zoho, Insightly, Sage CRM or Microsoft Dynamics then it will come with apps that let you access and update them when you are out of the office. So whether you need to update the status of a lead, access address data or convert a lead into a customer, you can do it instantly on your smartphone. It’s a great way of making the most of the travelling time on trains and planes, it also saves you time updating things at the end of the day.
DropBox
Are you one of the few people not using the brilliant DropBox? If you are often out and about out of the office and with other members of your team in other locations then there is no easier way of sharing and using files than DropBox. The files are sitting there in the cloud for any of your team to instantly access in a secure manner, DropBox is free for up to 2GB storage but if you need more, the plans are all great value.
Asana
Asana is a brilliant project management app and is perfect if you are the sort of person that loves checklists. Tasks can be easily prioritised, you can oversee where you are at with all of your projects. You can do this at a glance making it very user-friendly and good for seeing the ‘big picture’. As is expected of apps these days, it integrates with lots of other services including Google Drive, WordPress, Box, Slack and Evernote.
You’re almost certainly already on LinkedIn, but, do you have the LinkedIn app? It’s very user-friendly letting you do everything you can on the desktop version such as connecting with people, writing updates and articles as well as searching for business opportunities. It’s the perfect app to connect with people in your industry. It can also really help increase you and your organisation’s visibility.