If you’re a blogger, you can’t seem to get away from small businesses. These companies and the people who run them are all over the web, and for good reason.
These small business owners and freelancers are doing anything they can to use the technology at hand to turn a profit. It seems like a fairly basic concept, but did you know there are ways even the brightest small business owners aren’t utilizing the technology available to us?
If you’re reading this, it’s likely you own a smartphone. Most of the country now relies on smartphones for the latest news and sports updates, to help us conduct our daily business, and surprise, to make phone calls and send text messages.
But did you know there are smartphone applications that are designed specifically to help small business owners and freelancers alike with their corporate operations? Well, they do, and each day you let pass is one more day of additional stress and frustration that you do not need in the office. If you’re tired of coming home at the end of the day and stressing over the job, consider downloading these apps.
Asana
You may not have heard of this app before, but if you ever collaborate on projects with your employees or contractors, this is the perfect application for you. Asana removes the element of surprise from a collaboration, providing you with real-time progress of your projects. Asana only has you work with one interface, making it exceptionally simple to navigate and use.
Compared to other corporate management applications, Asana is amongst the most simple, making your life that much less stressful when you’re managing multiple projects and don’t have time to waste scrolling through multiple pages and interfaces.
Expensify
If you’ve owned your company for a while, you know how stressful tax season can be for a freelancer or small business owner. Tax codes provide small business owners with breaks for spending money to operate their companies, which can be entirely too difficult to properly track and difficult to store as you probably won’t think about them until March or April. This is where Expensify comes to the rescue.
As its website proclaims, Expensify produces “Expense reports that don’t suck!” Letting you take a photo of a receipt, this handy app categorizes your receipts and expenses based on customized subsections that you control, and will even sync your expenses and receipts with your accounting software.
Can you imagine enduring another tax season where you have to input all of this data into your accounting software? Well, don’t, because Expensify will nearly wipe away your troubles.
Mint
Unfortunately, when I first opened my own company, I didn’t know how important it was to properly manage my cash flow. Sure, I knew the basic principles, but in essence, I was foolish. I didn’t do the proper research, and I surely didn’t take advantage of Mint’s iPhone budgeting app, much to my chagrin.
Mint will let you track all of your earnings and expenses, set budgets in general or customized sub-budgets, and will help you stay on top of your expenses with bill reminders. And since Mint was acquired by Intuit, this app will effortlessly sync to your Intuit and QuickBooks software, making it a breeze to add to your current financial management program.
Dropbox
Back in November 2012, Dropbox announced it would claim to have over 100 million users. With that kind of following, Dropbox has to be on to something.
An easy-to-use and rather ingenious application, Dropbox is a file hosting service that uses cloud storage to allow its users to bring any type of file they might have to one location, where they can also share their media as desired. If you’ve ever been caught in traffic, had a sick child you needed to tend to, or have had anything else prevent you from getting files to someone in the office, Dropbox is the most efficient and secure file-sharing application I have found to date.