10 Must-Have Productivity Apps

10 Must-Have Productivity Apps

Who doesn’t want to do more in less time? We live in a great era of technology where every day there are new tools and apps coming onto the marketplace that make us more efficient. Here are a few that help business owners and managers get more done.

1. Podio

When you have projects to manage, it can be a challenge to keep up with who’s assigned what task and manage deadlines. Project management apps like Podio make it easy to communicate with your team, assign tasks, and track work. You can share files and keep all communications in one place.

2. FreshBooks

If you use FreshBooks for your accounting, the mobile app will really impress you. Not only can you manage your business accounts and send invoices, but you can also take pictures of your receipts to log expenses and use the time tracker to record time spent on client projects.

3. DropBox

Remember when you used to email large files and the recipient never got them? Not a problem when you use DropBox’s cloud storage. You can drag and drop documents, images, folders, whatever you want, and then share them with your team so everyone has access.

4. Google Calendar

I don’t know what I’d do without Google Calendar. I tend to list my to-dos as events on my calendar, so a glance at my schedule — on my desktop, laptop, or phone — tells me exactly what I should be doing. You get notifications to all your devices and to your email, which makes it virtually impossible to miss a meeting.

5. Google Drive

Yet another Google product I adore is Drive. I love being able to share my documents with clients so we can both make changes without emailing back and forth updated versions of the document.

6. Expensify

If you have to keep track of your expenses and receipts, you’ll love not having to hoard all your bits of paper, then attach them to a sheet of copy paper, scan it, and email it to your client or accountant. With Expensify, you simply scan receipts or input expenses directly from your phone. Bonus? It integrates with many accounting platforms.

7. Insightly

Customer relationship management makes it easy to keep track of conversations you’ve had with clients, take notes on their transactions, and generally provide better service. Insightly offers a desktop and mobile version of its über useful CRM, which lets you not only log client contact information but also assign tasks to your team.

8. Rapportive

If you’ve ever spent time hunting for a contact on LinkedIn, you’ll appreciate Rapportive. It’s a plugin you can use right from your email: when you open an email from a contact, information about their social profiles and websites appears, and you can easily click to connect on social media.

9. Square

If you accept payments on the go, you can’t beat Square for convenience. You affix a small card swiper to your phone or tablet, download the app, and boom. You’re accepting credit cards.

10. ScheduleBase

I’d be remiss if I left ScheduleBase out! For businesses that juggle employee shifts, this takes the headache out of creating that weekly schedule. I love that you can instantly text or email each employee his schedule.