It goes without saying that the life of an entrepreneur is a busy one. In some cases, entrepreneurs are overworking themselves, dedicating too much time and too many mental resources to their life’s work. In those instances, it’s helpful to reassess how much of the workload needs to be done in that instant – some entrepreneurs hire staff to help them carry out their business plan, while others simply take a break and come back to the problem with a fresh head.
If you’re an entrepreneur, another option for you is to use your smartphone to pick up some of the workload. Smartphone apps are a surprisingly helpful way to keep track of many aspects of your business; you can communicate, look at your finances, plan your strategy and do many other things simply through using apps. Here are 5 essential apps any entrepreneur should look at downloading.
Spending Tracker – Free (Google Play / iOS)
Whether you’re keeping track of your company’s finances or managing a personal loan you’ve taken out, MH Riley Ltd’s Spending Tracker is the best app we’ve found on the store for money management. The visual language of Spending Tracker is incredibly intuitive, presenting your financial information in list form and graph form so you can easily pinpoint where you can reduce spending or increase funding for aspects of your business. This app is especially great for smaller business owners, as its personal touches and emphasis on smaller transactions makes those without too much income or too many expenses able to track their finances with ease. There’s a Pro version available for a small fee which adds functions like repeating transactions.
Wunderlist – Free (Google Play / iOS)
Every entrepreneur has a massive list of tasks they need to complete. For that, there’s Wunderlist, an excellent and fully-featured note-taking app available for both Android and iOS devices. Like many great apps, Wunderlist is fully compatible with desktop and mobile devices, meaning you can share your notes across your network and access them from wherever you happen to be. Wunderlist also offers the ability to attach files to notes, making it perfect for business owners who need to quickly make PDFs, PowerPoint presentations and other documents available to employees or other devices. Combine this with other features like reminders, delegation features and list sharing, and Wunderlist is the only essential note-taking app for entrepreneurs.
Slack – Free (Google Play / iOS)
Slack is a messaging app that’s similar to Google Hangouts in some ways – businesses can create rooms, invite employees and share messages, files and other essential business exchanges. Slack is free for small businesses, with paid versions available which add new features like SSO and compliance exports. The free version of Slack only allows teams to search through 10k of their most recent messages, but that should be more than enough for the average small business and there’s nothing stopping you from creating your own records, meticulous and time-consuming as it may be. If you’re a small business witsh employees and you need to create a communication network, there’s really no better alternative than Slack.
Dropbox – Free, enterprise subscription available (Google Play / iOS)
Dropbox is the perfect way to share files and documents with your team instantly. If you’ve ever been part of one of those email chains that ends up over six hundred messages long where nobody can remember which email contains a particular file, then Dropbox is for you. The app itself is free, and both the Google Play and iOS versions are extremely intuitive and well mapped out, but you will need to pay for a subscription no matter which of the plans you opt for. There’s a 3TB version available for just £10 per month per user, so if you’re happy with sharing account details with your staff then that’s the ideal way to go for small businesses.
Trello – Free (Google Play / iOS)
Keeping track of your team’s projects and workloads can be difficult, but with a service like Trello the process is made a hundred times easier. Trello organises your team’s projects into boards, allowing you to see who’s working on what at a glance. You can also see how much progress has been made on the project, when the deadline is due and whereabouts in the process an employee is. This isn’t just great for teams; if you’re a sole trader, Trello can help you organise your life and compartmentalise your workload so it doesn’t feel quite as overwhelming. The basic version of Trello is free, but there’s a “business class” version available that adds more features, so if you’re finding you’ve done all you can do with Trello then by all means opt for the paid edition.
These are just 5 essential apps we think all entrepreneurs should download. Have we missed any? Do you have any suggestions of your own? Let us know!
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