Business owners and travellers are often juggling all kinds of information and responsibilities at any one time, so anything that helps organise tasks or deal with daily challenges can prove extremely valuable. Our ExpenseIn app for business expenses is a superb tool for your receipts and spreadsheets, but there are plenty more great apps out there that serve a very practical and handy purpose.
Here are five of our favourites:
OmniFocus is a great task manager for busy homes and the workplace, allowing you to create project categories, divide big jobs into manageable phases, quickly establish workflows and set goals and deadlines. One nice feature is its ‘location awareness,’ which means that if you pass a grocery store, for example, you’ll receive an alert to remind you of what you need to pick up. Once you get into the app, it works very nicely as a tool for collaboration, with prompts to share notes with colleagues and email out ideas for new projects.
A super-clean writing interface, a word and character count at the top of the screen, and smart preview and edit features. Drafts is a great note-taker app; you can select your preferred keyboard, get typing away, and share or post out to wherever you wish. For emails, messaging, Twitter, Facebook, and other apps it comes in very handy.
This is very beneficial to people who often end up trying to avoid dealing with number crunching. Traditional calculators are limited to the user’s ability to correctly identify the necessary logical route to an answer – 67 divided by 3.7 is straightforward enough if you have a calculator, but if, say, you want to work out a suitable restaurant tip and share it between your friends, the problem can become more complex. But Soulver has tools to deal with those practical issues; you can add whole percentage values, make conversions, and even add written phrases.
A very nicely designed app to record phone conversations, this comes in very useful for people who regularly have meetings on the phone, or sales reps, lawyers and team leaders. Conversations are stored in the app and can be easily accessed or sent to an alternative app.
Brilliant for those whose business takes them abroad, you say a phrase into your phone, which the app then translates and announces in the selected language. Don’t expect to suddenly be discussing last night’s football with the locals over a beer in a crowded bar in Prague, but it comes in useful for functional purposes and is great fun to use in social settings as well.
Once your business expenses are sorted, there are still plenty of other smart apps to be found for challenges that you never even imagined could be resolved with such apparent simplicity, all doing their bit to make busy lives a little easier – and fun.
