Drive Mobile Productivity with Apps

By Dave Moorman, DynaSis

Last month, I promised share more mobile productivity tips, and this week’s article marks the second installment in an ongoing series. Today, we’ll review some valuable productivity apps―mobile applications workers install on their phones to streamline their workdays.

While no mobile app can be deemed 100% uncrackable, none of these have been implicated in any security breaches and they require minimal access to corporate data or networks. (If you are concerned about security, discourage your employees from using Android devices. Android is a great platform, but the percentage of mobile malware that targets Android has risen to 80%.)

Expensify
Expense reports are an ongoing hassle for SMBs, their employees and management, especially frequent travelers who end up with briefcases full of receipts to process. Expensify lets users snap pictures of receipts with smartphones and upload them to a website. Expensify also supports and reads scanned receipts uploaded from desktop and laptop computers and can process receipts embedded in purchase confirmation emails. Just forward them to receipts@expensify.com in one of nine supported, common format and Expensify adds them to your account.

The first 10 scans each month are free, and companies that upgrade their subscription enjoy added features, such secure integration with leading accounting packages and direct deposit reimbursement to employees. We also like Shoeboxed, which in addition to these features will scan and process paper receipts that you mail to the company. Shoeboxed can be more expensive than Expensify if you need QuickBooks integration, but depending upon your level of disorganization might be a better choice.

Genius Scan
This app turns your workers’ smartphones into scanners. Whether they are across the country, down the street or on the other side of the office, they can use their smartphone cameras to take a picture of any document they want to scan. They can also capture details on items―such as equipment labels (or the equipment itself).

Of course, most smartphone cameras can already take decent pictures of just about anything. What makes Genius Scan so much more valuable is that it lets users tag their scans for easy document identification and upload them securely to a variety of cloud-based storage services. It also improves the quality of scans to make them more legible, creates a database that is searchable by name or date, and lets users group documents together into PDFs.

MobileDay
This application syncs with employees’ calendars and reminds them about conference calls and online meetings, then lets them dial in with a single click. It accomplishes this feat by auto-detecting conference call details within the meeting invites. In addition to traditional conference calling setups, it supports GoToMeeting, Google+ Hangouts, WebEx, Apple FaceTime and Skype Audio. For companies that use SalesForce, it offers a special version that lets workers upload details of new meetings and conference events directly to their accounts.

The corporate version also offers least-cost dialing, which means it chooses the least expensive dial-in option among the available lines offered by a company’s conference service. MobileDay also touts its strong security and states that no corporate information leaves a user’s device during its processes.