It is clear to see just how much of an impact mobile usage is making by allowing people to be better connected. While bigger businesses are already on the mobile wave by developing apps that allow their customers to interact with them on a much more mobile scale. For smaller businesses, the opportunity for change is there and too great to ignore. The New Bank of the West and Harris Interactive conducted a survey in late 2012 and they found that:

“Small business owners surveyed think mobile technology could be made more useful, cost effective and safer for small business purposes. “Few relevant uses for my business” was named the number one barrier to taking advantage of mobile technology, at 33 percent, followed by cost, at 25 percent.”

This is somewhat unfortunate since a smartphone is capable of so much more than the basics small business owners use them for and by finding the right apps, they could make their lives easier while making their business perform better than ever. Here are a few apps that any small business should consider taking advantage of.

Asana

Asana is work software that manages to make the complicated much more manageable. Justin Rosenstein, one of its co-founders, had this to say over at the blog on Asana’s website:

“Asana’s task management app is a content management system for one particular kind of structured data.”

Harvest

Harvest, a time tracking app, is currently available on the Google Apps Marketplace and is described as:

“Harvest is a simple time tracking application which makes it fast and convenient for businesses and freelancers to track time. Easy to setup and fast to deploy for teams of all sizes.”

It is also said to analyze costs for hours worked so you can pay the employees who do overtime accurately.

Bump

Bump is an app for sharing contacts that can be done by bumping two smartphones against each other, which is where the name for the app came from. Here is the company’s official explanation for how it works:

“There are two parts to Bump: the app running on your device and a smart matching algorithm running on our servers in the cloud. The app on your phone uses the phone’s sensors to literally “feel” the bump, and it sends that info up to the cloud. The matching algorithm listens to the bumps from phones around the world and pairs up phones that felt the same bump. Then we just route information between the two phones in each pair.”

It can also receive documents like photos and such that can be organized by the app. All of this is done by bumping smartphones together.

Square

Any business, especially smaller ones, which do not accept credit card payments is losing out on revenues and customers. A lot of people now prefer to use their cards when buying and if you have to burden them by making them take a trip to an ATM, you are driving them away. If you want to use a smartphone to accept payments via credit card, Square may be the app for you. Here is how it works, according to Tiago Olson over at Protean Payment:

“…Square turns your smartphone or tablet into a credit card scanner/reader using a reader that fits into your audio jack and works with the Square reader App. The hardware and app is free, but Square will take a small percentage of each transaction,”

Now, you have no reason not to accept credit cards.

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