10 Best Apps For Small Business Owners

Many entrepreneurs working on a business plan for a new business daydream about being their own boss. They believe that life would be easier if they could work for themselves and run their businesses from wherever they are, using a mobile phone for most tasks.

Running your entire business from your phone without compromising features or ease of use seems impossible.

However, in our increasingly fast-paced business culture, few successful business owners can operate their businesses while tethered to their office desks. Many must find ways to work while they’re away from the office.

Fortunately, small business owners live in a time of virtual riches. There is an abundance of productivity and business mobile apps that can help you run your business remotely, and many of these are free or inexpensive.

Here are ten terrific mobile apps you should consider using in your small 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 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 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 free, and affordable subscriptions unlock 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 challenging. 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 without a big HR team will find Gusto invaluable. Gusto helps you manage administrative work, including 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? It has been so long that its original release in the 1980s ran on MS-DOS, proving to be 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 for 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 too pricey, you’ll often see 50% off specials.

Quickbooks, including QuickBooks Pro, has many integrations with other popular small business tools. For example, you can create a QuickBooks woocommerce integration if you have an online shop.

Slack

There is a seemingly endless flood of apps and services to help you and your employees stay in contact, but Slack is one of the biggest and most beloved.

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 business, real-time chat, file sharing, and audio/video calls. To further enhance your Slack experience, consider integrating an AI-powered knowledge bot for Slack, which can streamline information retrieval and improve team productivity.

Slack’s feature-rich free package might be all you need, but there are also paid tiers starting at $7 monthly 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 platforms, making it accessible and functional for small and big business owners.

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, but a $39 yearly subscription unlocks several powerful add-ons, like location-based reminders and project templates. If you need organizational help, did you remember where you left the keys? – Todoist might be the app you’ve been searching for.

Tripcase

Travel organizer app Tripcase is “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.

Most 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 going places, Tripcase is a good thing to pack.

Adobe Scan

Creative software veteran Adobe recently entered the crowded “use your phone as a scanner” market with the 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 a tedious job. Adobe Scan is a free app available for iOS and Android devices.

Evernote

Thanks to Adobe Scan, you can have a virtual stack of scanned documents in your digital workspace. This can get out of hand quickly, so once you’ve scanned your documents, organize them (and many other file types) with Evernote.

Evernote is one of the first “everything bucket” apps. Although several high-profile competitors have been introduced (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 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 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 additional team and business plans are also available. 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 by doing “that” when “this” occurs.

Confused? Here’s an example: You can create an applet (a tiny application performing one or a few simple functions) that automatically saves any images you upload to Evernote straight to your Dropbox account. You can turn your home lighting system 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 a compelling service that is surprisingly easy to use. It offers hundreds of pre-made recipes, is free to use, and is available online, with clients for iOS and Android.

Running a business can be overwhelming.

Using available technology to make your business run smoothly and efficiently can transform 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.