8 Leading Small Business Apps

 

• Shoeboxed. This is a great app for keeping track of receipts and paperwork digitally by scanning them into your own personal database. It’s good for personal use, as well, but it excels as a small business app, since small businesses can have a pretty overwhelming volume of receipts and papers to compile each day. If you feel like you could use an organizational helper, look no further.
• Quickbooks. If you need a more comprehensive accounting platform, check out Quickbooks, which will help you collect and track payments and expenses. If there is one thing every business has in common, it’s the need to keep track of money, which makes money management a perfect service for a small business app.
• Square. This one hits the nail on the head when it comes to the easy adoption and convenience needed from small business apps. It’s not an ideal long-term solution for some businesses, due to the transaction fees, while others will consider it an acceptable payment for the service. Either way, it’s a great example of a broad-reaching small business app solution.

• Google Drive, Dropbox. These two apps provide great cloud data storage that can really improve the way small business employees collaborate and share documents. Small businesses really benefit from tools that tighten their teamwork, and these services are secure and easy to set up.
• Asana. Speaking of collaboration, have you ever felt like email was holding back your attempts to communicate with your team? Asana takes all the good bits about email (communicating, keeping a record of progress, attaching documents) and creates a whole new work ecosystem around them that is far better optimized for organizing and executing projects.
• G Cloud Backup. Another important use of cloud services is backing up your data. Though it isn’t specifically a small business app, the G Cloud app is all about backing up your phone’s data daily—we all know how frustrating it can be to lose or break our phones and lose our SMS, media, and contact information, but for a small business, such a setback could be disastrous, making it all the more important to set up this kind of safety net.
• Mozy. You’ll also need to back up your computer files, and Mozy provides a great cloud service for this. They even provide an app which lets you access those documents via mobile, even if your computer goes down.
• Hootsuite. This app is great for managing social media marketing by bringing all major social media outlets and tools into a single interface. Perhaps more importantly, from a small business marketing perspective, is the ability to schedule posts ahead of time, allowing you to set everything up for the next, say, week, and then forget about it and move on to other tasks.

 

All of these apps provide key services for general business practices, and do so in a way that is easy to adopt and implement into a variety of business models. The more specific you get with your needs, the less likely you’ll be to find an app solution, but you can always just make a new app (it’s really not that hard). If you see a common small business need that isn’t covered by an affordable third-party app, that’s some prime entrepreneurial material, and you should call the experts for a free, confidential, no obligation consultation.