Mobile Apps for Business: 30 Smartphone Must-Haves

With the huge choice of mobile apps for business, it has never been easier to manage your business remotely. Here are our 30 must-have mobile business smart phone apps to save time, increase productivity and help for you to work smarter.

[Image: Evernote]

30 mobile apps for business

Mobile finance apps

# 1. Xero

Get an overview of the accounts for every organization you manage with the Xero app. Check your bank balances, recent transactions and who owes you money on the go. A particularly handy tab allows you to call any contact with your iPhone, Windows Mobile or Blackberry.

# 2. FreeAgent

FreeAgent is a bookkeeping and accounting application for small businesses and freelancers which helps take the jargon out of accounting and also gives you real-time visibility of how your business is performing.

# 3. Timesheets.com

Some businesses need hourly time tracking for payroll or time-off, while others need project time tracking for billing or job costing. With Timesheets you can do either, or both, and even capture all your workforce’s reimbursable expenses while you’re at it.

# 4. ExpenseCloud

Manage your entire expense management process online with ExpenseCloud, either by creating expense reports for personal reimbursement, invoicing clients, or tracking approvals across your entire company. ExpenseCloud imports expenses from thousands of credit card and bank providers; including receipt scanning and expense capture capabilities for Android, iPhone and Blackberry.

# 5. iCurrency pad

iCurrency pad is, as the name hints, a currency converter and gives exchange rates in real time on an electronic board. It also has detailed graphs of historical price trends.

# 6. MyBudgetBuddy

The official app of the Irish League of Credit Unions, the MyBudgetBuddy app is an easy-to-use budgeting application that helps you understand and manage your income and expenses.

# 7. Paypal

Send and request money plus manage your account on your mobile now via the Paypal app.

NB It’s worth checking to see if your Business Bank has an app that you can download to use to access and keep an eye on your business account.

 

Mobile travel apps

# 8. Stay.com

The Stay.com app, available for both iOS and Android, allows you to download a full city map and all your guides, so you can access them anytime offline. You can also locate yourself on the offline city map without adding to your phone bill and create your own personalized travel guides.

# 9. Yelp

The Yelp app is a good one for travelers as it lets you search for places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play then read reviews from an active community of locals in the know.

# 10. SeatGuru

The SeatGuru app provides you with seat maps and insights from over 35,000 flier reviews, so you can find out which seats are the best and which ones to avoid. Also includes Real-time flight status alerts and a flight search engine. Available for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android

# 11. Tripit

Described as “All of your travel plans on-the-go”, the Tripit app lets you store trip details and itineraries that are synchronized with your calendar. A handy feature is that you can easily share trip plans with family or colleagues directly.

Also available: TripIt Pro, which is like having your own personal travel assistant for $49/year. Especially helpful for frequent travelers, TripIt Pro monitors your flights for potential airfare savings, and sends you status alerts and other helpful reminders while you’re traveling.

# 12. NearMe

The NearMe app lets you pull up category searches such as restaurants, pubs and petrol stations that are near your phone. As well as contact details, you can get directions with Google Maps, Navigon and Tom Tom.

 

Mobile social media apps

# 13. Twitter

The Twitter app is a must-have for anyone who manages one or more Twitter accounts. It lets you set up multiple profiles and obviously Tweet, but also view responses, find people and hashtags. TIP: to set up more than one Twitter profile on the app, tap the people icon on the Me tab on the app to add new profiles and switch between profiles.

# 14. Hootsuite

For those of you who use Hootsuite to manage your social media, the Hootsuite app gives you the same functionality on the go allowing you to manage campaigns, schedule updates and even offers translation for other languages if you’re away.

# 15. Facebook Pages

Another must-have for the facebook admin and page manager. Helps you check in and manage any facebook pages you are an administrator of. You can check feedback from page fans, read their messages, post a status or a photo. It would be handy to have access to more Insights than the current app has but at least there are some high level stats available.

# 16. LinkedIn

With the LinkedIn app, you can create updates and view updates from your connections, read and respond to messages, search for people or check your connections plus check in with what’s happening on Groups.

# 17. Pinterest

If you have made the foray into the world of Pinterest for your business, we’d recommend the Pinterest app. You can view and create boards, repin items and explore and find new content. NB you can’t add other admins to your boards through the app at the moment although you can create the boards.

# 18. Buffer

A bit like Hootsuite, Buffer app allows you to share to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and App.net account, you just add any link, text, picture or video you want to share to your Buffer. Your updates will automatically be scheduled and posted well spaced out over the day to your favorite social networks. Also has analytics for each social update you share: Clicks, retweets, likes, shares, mentions and more, and we like the fact that you can also add to your Buffer by emailing it in so if you are using other apps such as Flipboard, Pulse, etc you can share that content easily.

# 19. Instagram

Another handy app for those using Instagram for their social media. Log in as your business account and you will be able to upload images and check on what reaction your followers have to them. You can also pull up hashtags if you are, for example, running photo based competitions or looking for new ideas in the world of Instagram.

 

Mobile sales & marketing apps

# 20. Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is known for its online sales force and marketing automation. It now has a mobile version, native application that lets you access your CRM data anywhere, anytime from your mobile phones (iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry). With the Zoho CRM Mobile Edition, you will stay on top of the latest business developments, collaborate with your team etc. One feature that looks handy is to be able to find your nearby customers and get the driving directions from the address information.

# 21. Mailchimp

This email marketing tool makes it easy to send email newsletters to your customers, manage your subscriber lists, and track campaign performance. MailChimp automatically takes care of your sign-ups, un-subscribes, and bounce-back cleaning. You can view reports, add new subscribers, and manage your lists with MailChimp’s iPhone and Android apps.

 

Mobile team collaboration apps

# 22. Dropbox

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Their app allows you to pull up all your photos, docs and videos from any device. No more emailing yourself!

# 23. Google Drive

Google Docs is now part of Google Drive and lets you create, share and keep all your stuff in one place. Upload all your files – even the big ones – and you can access them anywhere, even on your iPhone or iPad. Use the Google Drive app to access and manage your Google Drive docs and files.

# 24. BillQuick

The new BillQuick Mobile App lets you easily add expenses, quickly track time and seamlessly sync your information with your BillQuick Online or Web Suite account—all from the convenience of your phone. It niftily allows information to be entered even when there isn’t connection to a data network, such as on a plane or at a client location with a poor or non-existent signal. Then once the phone detects a network, it automatically syncs the information with the server. BillQuick Mobile is available for the iOS and Android.

# 25. Skype

A must-have for any business owner. The Skype app allows you to make free Skype to Skype video calls and call phones at low rates on the move and free voice and video calls to anyone else on Skype. Skype works on 3G* and WiFi – so you can stay in touch, even if you’re out and about.

 

Mobile productivity apps

# 26. Evernote

This one got a big thumbs up from business owners that we talked to. According to their website, “Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your everyday life using your computer, phone, tablet and the web.”. The Evernote app helps keep everything in sync, saves everything you see online and in the real world and you can share your notes and collaborate on projects with colleagues.

# 27. Notability

With voice recording and handwriting integration for your notes, Notability integrates handwriting, voice recording, PDF annotation, and media into a single app. You can even enhance your notes by adding pictures from your photo library or from the iPad camera and insert web clips, figures and drawings to compliment your notes.

# 28. iThoughtsHD

iThoughtsHD is available for both iPad and iPhone and is a mind mapping tool which enables you to visually organise your thoughts, ideas and information. Use it for task lists, brainstorming, project planning and more. O’Reilly Best iPhone Apps Top Pick. iThoughtsHD will also import and export mindmaps to and from many of the most popular desktop mindmap applications such as MyThoughts, Freemind, Freeplane, XMind, Novamind, MindManager, MindView, ConceptDraw MINDMAP, MindGenius and iMindmap.

# 29. FTP On The Go PRO

An FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. With FTP On the Go you can view and edit HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/ASP, or other files on your server with it’s built in editor to change your website from anywhere as well as being able to view images and documents in different formats too. FTP On The Go has been Featured in Apple’s “iPhone in Business” Apps as well as being chosen by InformationWeek as one of “10 Great iPhone Apps For Your Business”. Pro adds iPad support as well.

# 30. Fast Analytics

If you’ve been looking for a good app to check in with your Google Analytics, then this is the app for you. The Fast Analytics app gives fast access to headline data and supports multiple Google Analytics™ accounts and you can easily switch between them without re-authenticating. You can view stats over 1 day, 1 week, 1 month or 1 year time periods, with an easy to use dashboard for fast access to common stats such as traffic sources, search keywords, content viewed and visitor information.

We hope that this information will help with your business and how you use apps. Have you got a favourite business app that we didn’t include? Please share it with us.

 

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