5 Apps to Help Entrepreneurs Keep Their Crap Together
Organization is the key to running a successful business – and luckily, there’s plenty of apps to help you keep organized.
Running a business can be hectic – beyond hectic. When you first begin a business or start to expand it, even the most savvy entrepreneur can find themselves overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork, financial documents, and general details that come with trying to keep everything moving smoothly.
No matter how naturally organized you are – sometimes there’s just too much to do, and not enough brainpower to keep track of everything. And if you’re a naturally unorganized person – you may find yourself drowning in more and more details as you try and figure out what’s most important.
According to Jason Baril, attorney and co-founder of Ogle, Elrod and Baril PLLC, organization is one of the most important things to keep a business running smoothly. He says, “I recommend finding the right organizational tool that fits your business so that you don’t have to spend as much time on it. There’s tons of websites and apps out there, designed to keep people organized – and for the busy entrepreneur, it can be a lifesaver.”
There are plenty of apps and websites out there, designed to help busy entrepreneurs and businesses running smoothly and efficiently. Find the right one, and you’ll find you have more time to work on your business, and less on administration.
An eye on business expenses
Expensify is an app that can help keep track of all your business expenses in one place. An account on this app can be linked to multiple phones or tablets. Using the camera on your phone, you can scan your receipts to consolidate your spending easily.
Not only that, but you can program your standards for employee reimbursement into the app. Anything that falls under the category ‘instant’ doesn’t even need the business owner’s approval to provide the employee reimbursement.
But things that don’t fall into this category will be presented to the person in charge of approving the expenses before the employee is reimbursed. It makes the whole process quick and painless, so employees don’t have to worry about reimbursement, and the business owner doesn’t have to take a lot of time out of their day to check the expenses, then go through and reimburse the employee.
Plan out progress
Instead of having to schedule tedious progress meetings each week – or each day – to ask for updates from your teams, it would be much easier if you simply kept all of that information in one place for a quick reference. That’s where an app like Asana comes in: to help you keep your business as organized as possible.
This platform is an all-in-one task organizer that can be used by multiple people all at once. It can be used to schedule tasks, add to-do lists, hold conversations about specific items, upload attachments – anything you could possibly need to keep your business organized in one place.
It is one of the easiest ways to track your team’s progress towards specific goals and check in to make sure that they have everything they need to keep moving forward.
Never forget notes
This app is mostly used for storage of documents, pictures, and other things as well as organizing them. Evernote is convenient for businesses as everything on it is synced across any linked device – which makes it ideal for securely sharing data in a business.
The app also has an advanced search feature which can search for keywords across everything it stores – from files to pictures, it can bring up anything in its memory that contains those words. This means that even if you don’t keep your files organized enough to find what you need, you won’t be stuck searching through them for hours looking for the right thing. This saves time, and helps keep everything flowing smoothly.
Figure out finances
Because truly no one likes keeping the books, FreshBooks was designed to help small businesses keep their finances organized without having to learn the ins-and-outs of accounting. Since it was designed with people who don’t have any basis in finance or accounting mind, FreshBooks is purposefully simple and easy to use.
You can it to organize your business expenses, track your time, and follow up with clients – which are normally time-consuming processes. Like most of the other apps on this list – this service also syncs between devices, ensuring you can access your information from any business device you have.
Marketing mastermind
Designed to make email marketing as painless as possible, MailChimp is an automated advertising and marketing service utilized by many businesses in the world. Its targeted marketing service makes it easy for entrepreneurs to reach their customers in direct and strategic ways. Linking their sites or services to MailChimp directly allows them to more easily promote your business. They use an automated tool to track your customers’ shopping and email behaviors, so that they can better advertise to your consumers in the future.
They also integrate other forms of advertising into their service – Facebook ads, for example – to ensure that you are reaching your target audience.
by MELISSA THOMPSON
