12 Best Small Business Apps

Small business owners are busy. It goes with the territory. Apps have become extremely powerful and are huge assets for small business owners, especially on-the-go. Here’s a collection of the 10 best small business apps to help make running your business a little bit easier.

Expensify

Managing travel can be difficult, but managing expenses can be even harder. You know expense receipt-keeping is important, but it can be painful and receipts are easy to lose. Turn to Expensify to sync with your credit cards and bank accounts. Cash purchases can be scanned by simply taking a picture of the receipt.  Cost: Free. However, there’s a cost for team and corporate plans.

Quickbooks

The Intuit QuickBooks app is a big help when it comes to your accounting and bookkeeping needs. QuickBooks’s accounting software helps you run your business and provides a full sense of your company’s financial health. This app includes robust tools to track your business’s expenses and sales, view financial statements, pay your employees, track unpaid invoices and more. Try it free for 30 days.

Square Invoices

Square Invoices allows you to create and send custom invoices to your customers and clients. When they receive an invoice, it can be paid online – making the process smooth and easy. In addition, Square Invoices helps you keep track of customer invoices. You’ll be able to see who already paid and which customers still have a bill due.

Square Invoices does not have a monthly fee. Instead, you’ll pay a processing fee when a customer uses a card to pay the invoice. The processing fee can vary from 2.9% plus 30 cents to 3.5% plus 15 cents.

Slack

Slack is a real-time messaging and collaboration tool for small businesses with the ability to organize conversations into separate private or public channels or send a direct message.  Slack’s business app allows you to drag and drop files, so you can quickly share information. It even integrates with Dropbox, Google Drive, Salesforce, and more. You can try Slack for free but a paid plan offers more features and controls for $8/month per user.

GoToMeeting

No matter the size of your business, there is a good chance you will be hosting meetings or webinars, especially for those not in the office. GoToMeeting allows you to host conference calls or trainings that allow participants to join via phone, tablet or at a computer. You can also share screens with this app and attend or start sessions from anywhere.

MailChimp

There are many email marketing tools available for small businesses today, but MailChimp helps you easily manage email lists and create and send newsletters. With this app, you can build and customize email templates and view reports to track email performance. Pricing for this app depends on the number of subscribers in your email list.

Gusto

Gusto is an online service to help manage your company’s payroll, benefits and HR needs. Gusto offers many options to help you choose the right plan and budget for your small business. This app automatically reports new hires, handles local, state and federal tax filings and automates deductions for benefits and workers’ compensation. This app starts at $39 per month with and additional per-employee cost per month.

Evernote

This handy app helps you remember whatever you need to remember across multiple devices, including from your computer to your phone. You can type messages, record voice notes, and snap pictures all to help your team’s productivity. Evernote’s free version lets users upload up to 60 megabytes of data per month with more options for an additional cost.

TripIt®

Travel frequently for business? TripIt helps you stay organized. Just forward your reservation confirmation emails and the app builds an itinerary you can access while on the go. This app allows you to consolidate your travel plans into one master itinerary that can be accessed on any device, any time. You can also check on flight times, weather, delays or find directions.

HootSuite

You know social media is important, but it’s time-consuming to keep up with multiple apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. HootSuite pulls them all together, allowing you to use a single app to communicate on a variety of social media platforms. There are five plans available, including a free version.

Dropbox, Google G Suite, Apple iCloud

You probably have a lot of different documents and files stored on your work computer. Storing those important files in the cloud not only saves some space on your computer, but it also means you can access them at any time.

Dropbox, Google’s G Suite, and Apple’s iCloud are all services that allow users to store their files in the cloud. Using a web browser or the respective app, users can access their files on the go. So if you need to show a client a specific document or print out a contract while you’re traveling, you can do so with these apps.

Dropbox, Google Cloud, and Apple iCloud offer free plans with a limited amount of storage. For each service, you can purchase additional storage space for a monthly cost. Dropbox offers 1 TB of space for $8.25 a month or 2 TB for $16.58 a month.

Google’s G Suite offers a basic tier for $5 a month, which includes 30 GB of storage. A business and enterprise tier is priced at $10 and $25 a month, respectively. These tiers offer unlimited storage, or 1 TB for each user if there are less than five users.

Apple provides iCloud users with 5 GB of free storage. Users can upgrade to 50 GB for 99 cents a month, 200 GB for $2.99 a month, or 2 TB for $9.99 a month.

OmniFocus

From running a business to completing everyday tasks, business owners have a lot to juggle. OmniFocus is a productivity app that helps users understand what tasks or projects are due. Tasks and projects can be organized by tags  and the app can help you with completing the to-dos.

Pricing starts at $39.99 for the standard app. OmniFocus offers a pro version for $79.99.