5 Appls for Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs often have a hundred things on their mind at a time. Mental capacity is at a premium. Smart entrepreneurs learn to only focus on what matters. They also learn to delegate tasks and optimize for efficiency. This is where your smart phone comes in. There are so many apps available to help you stay organized and free up mental real estate for more important items. Here is a selection of five apps for entrepreneurs that can help you stay focused on what matters most.
No matter what problem your business is dealing with, chances are that there is an expert who has faced that issue and written a book about it. Ignoring the wealth of knowledge available by business authors is an unforgivable mistake. But who has time to sit down and read an entire book? This is where audible is so great. Put a book on your phone and let someone read it to you while you work out, drive between appointments, make dinner, or prepare for bed. Audible lets you multi-task while you are learning how to improve your business.
Staying on top of your accounting can be a significant time-drain. The QuickBooks app makes this a little easier. Since it’s mobile, you can use downtime to classify transactions. While you are waiting in line, watching tv, or sitting on the exercise bike, you can catch up your accounting records in a matter of minutes. Quickbooks links to your bank account and downloads all your transactions and uses its smart algorithms to put those transactions into categories. Most of the work is done for you. You just need to verify the new transactions and classify the few that QuickBooks didn’t recognize. Now with your accounting in the cloud, you can ask your CPA to look at a question you have without ever needing to send files back and forth. Quickbooks also lets you send estimates on the spot, send invoices, and collect payments, all from your phone.
For many entrepreneurs, one of your biggest tax deductions is your auto expenses. Tracking your mileage is a painful, but necessary part of qualifying for that deduction. MileIQ does a lot of the work for you. It stays in the background and logs all your drives. You open it periodically and classify those drives as business or personal. MileIQ assembles these into a file that you can easily send to your accountant at the end of the year. On average, for every business trip you forget to record, it costs you about $2 in tax. That adds up fast! Let MileIQ help you maximize your tax deduction.
This handy little tool lets you use your phones camera to quickly create a pdf document. So, if you need a copy of a contract, a receipt, or anything else while you are out and about, CamScanner will convert the picture to pdf and allow you to easily send it to yourself, your employee, your attorney, or your accountant all without having to go back to the office and fire up the scanner.
Use CamCard to capture all your business cards, and all the contact information can be quickly & accurately read and saved to your smartphone. In addition to extracting the information off a business card, CamCard has some very cool features that allow you to get notified when a contact changes jobs or gets promoted. It can also alert you when a contact’s company shows up in the news.
Leveraging the smart tools available to you on your phone can free up time and mental capacity for more important stuff. If you are willing to invest some time to learning some of these tools, they can make you a quicker more efficient business owner.