No one ever said running a business was easy.
In fact, someone once said “If you’re not having sleepless nights – you’re not doing it right.”
Of course, now everything is different. Not only are business owners getting their 8 hours sleep a night (those lucky things) but they can organize their offices remotely – and even from their smart phone or tablet if they needed to. The internet has literally changed the way businesses operate – and if you’re not taking advantage of the great tools and apps out there – then you’re seriously missing a trick.
If you’re reading this thinking it perhaps sounds too good to be true – while your chaotic office buzzes around you – then keep reading and have a browse through these incredible business apps that will change the way you work forever.
Long gone are the days where we would stick a spread sheet on a floppy disk and pass it round the office in turn – letting everyone download it. In fact – even the more modern USB may soon be rendered useless.
DropBox lets you sync and save files from many computers remotely – meaning you can access them from all over the world from any computer – just so long as they have DropBox installed. It is genuinely revolutionary to businesses who file share regularly and it’ll become you knew favourite thing with minutes of signing up. How will it cut out the hassle though? Well instead of hassling your employees to email you documents, etc. – you can just all save automatically into a shared folder. Simple.
If your employees have company cars – and a lot of your time is often eaten up by calculating expenses, then VehiCal will be welcomed with open arms into your routine. Instead of sitting and manually tracking things like fuel, miles, highway tolls, gas prices, congestion charge this app simply does it all for you. It also keeps your road tax to a minimum too – by calculating the best routes and the best rates for you.
Another major expense of modern offices is travel prices. But it’s not just an expense of cash – it eats into your time too. Let’s face it – for a medium to large company who are frequently travelling, it can be pretty easy to lose track of who is where, when they’re going, and how much it’s all costing you. This app just simplifies everything – meaning you can organise multiple trips for multiple people all in the same place – whilst also finding the best flight-times and prices too.
In my office, the question that gets asked the most is “What’s the password to that again?”… It is something that has often driven many members of staff to the point of madness. If your business is using multiple software, and has multiple bank accounts, has a number of social media accounts, etc. – it can be easy to start losing track of which password correlates with which account.
The amount of times I’ve blocked myself from various accounts because I was blindingly entering in the password for something completely different is countless…. So let’s not discuss it further. When I found 1Password it pretty much changed everything – I wasn’t scrambling around in draws trying to find the piece of paper I’d scribbled the passcode on, and the shouting in the office stopped. Everyone only needed to know one password – and then they had access to all of them. Simple premise really – but so effective.
Evernote is like the modern version of the to-do list. You can clip webpages, articles, links and images into categories and projects – that then reminds you to re-check them at a later date and refer back to them. But the great thing is you can sync it across all your devices – so you access your to-do list via your computer, your tablet, your phone – everything. Get all your staff signed up and you’ll begin noticing an overall feeling of calm – because when you have all these things stored and listed somewhere safe you lose the panic that comes with forgetting.
