Useful Smartphone Apps for Small Businesses

You’re a connected entrepreneur. You use social media, you take meeting notes on your iPad and participate in conference calls with your Android phone. Good stuff!

Now, it’s time to take your smartphone or tablet use to the next level. Take a look at the three popular apps you should be using already, then check out three more great business apps you might want to consider installing on your device to become more effective and efficient!

Three Must-Have Business Apps

Document Software – Whether you use Documents To Go, Quickoffice or OfficeSuite, you’ll need one of these apps to continue working on those Word/Excel/Powerpoint docs when you’re commuting or otherwise away from your computer. If one isn’t perfectly compatible with one of your documents (i.e. works well with Word docs, but doesn’t edit Excel spreadsheets cleanly), try one of the others and you might find it does the trick.

Google Apps – It seems a bit unfair that Google has so many apps business people should already have on their devices. From Google Maps (bye-bye GPS) to Google Translate (au-revoir dictionnaire), Google Voice Search (Siri who?) and Google Search (oh yeah, it’s also a search engine), these are tried and true apps you should be using every day.

Okay, so I managed to list seven ‘must-have’ apps instead of three. You know what they say, under-promise and over-deliver! Now on to three apps that you might not know about, but should!

Three Great Business Apps You Might Not Know About

CamScanner – Have you ever been onsite at a client’s office and needed to copy an important document? Now you can use CamScanner for iPhone or Android to transform your smartphone into a portable scanner. Create PDFs you can email to yourself or your office. Capture articles and receipts to your hoarding-heart’s content!

Evernote – Where can you keep all the PDFs from above so you can access them anywhere? Why in your Evernote account, of course. While there are some other great, similar apps like Dropbox, I’m a personal fan of Evernote, and find it extremely handy to have access to all my notes, pictures, Excel sheets and lists from my tablet, laptop and phone. Update from one device and you update them all! It’s cloud computing at its best!

Birthdays – Free – Here’s one from left field. If you’re an entrepreneur, you most likely have customers, employees, suppliers, referral sources, and the list goes on. Use this free and easy-to-use app to track important dates for all these key people, including their birthdays, anniversaries, and milestones. You can then separate yourself from the rest of the competition by showing your key contacts how much you care!

There you have it, some great apps for the small business owner. While I think these 10 are great, there are also (at last check) over 500,000 apps on iTunes and Google Play EACH for you to explore.

As a small business owner, what apps do you use?

Edmar Selda is a Commercial Account Manager at BMO, based in Concord, Ont.