Although it started out as a new toy for browsing the internet whilst lying on your sofa the iPad has actually developed into an incredibly useful business tool. If you are an entrepreneur or have your own small business then you will find the iPad invaluable for organising your day, simplifying your workflow and keeping you in touch with clients, customers, staff and other businesses. It can help you with your finances and organise your travel, create new documents on the fly and let you review old documents when you get a moment to yourself. Indeed there are tens of thousands of business apps out there for the iPad and the only problem for an iPad owning entrepreneur is choosing which of those apps are worth downloading.
What are the Most Important Apps to Download First for Your iPad?
- Twitter: Everyone tweets nowadays and if your business isn’t doing the same then you are losing out on some much-needed social media goodness. Twitter isn’t just about chatting and gossip; rather it is proving to be an incredibly important and useful method for businesses both to increase the size of their customer base and to conduct a dialogue with the customers they already have. Thanks to the simplicity of Twitter it has very quickly become the primary social media tool for most small businesses. Best of all it is free and will therefore provide small business owners with exceptional value in terms of advertising costs. Similarly the Twitter app for the iPad is also free and comes with a number of excellent features that let you keep a record of all your tweets as well as being able to search for any tweets that mention your business.
- Dropbox: The one thing missing from the iPad is a good storage facility for important business documents. Most small business owners will already use Dropbox in some way on their main computers, normally as a way of storing stuff in the cloud and being able to access it on the move. Adding the free iPad app turns your iPad into another place to transfer and manage your business documents and to read them when you are on the move. An invaluable app.
- WordPress: For entrepreneurs and small business owners who run their own website using WordPress, the recent release of WordPress for the iPad was a godsend. Another app that is free to download, WordPress for iPad lets you update your blog(s), respond to (or delete) comments, edit text, image and videos and tweak the design.
- Evernote: It doesn’t matter what type of business you run, you will inevitably collect all kinds of information, notes, pictures, videos, documents, pdf’s and clippings in your day-to-day business activities. The genius of Evernote is that it allows you to store all of these different types of information in one place in the cloud, accessible by all of your devices including your iPad. The iPad app is free but you can pay for upgrades in memory. It is an essential iPad app as it slips into your daily workflow by helping you to quickly and easily grab any important information in any format onto your iPad and then make it accessible and searchable from all of your other devices. It synchronises automatically from the cloud and does so quicker than most other iPad apps.
- Vehical: Everyone knows that any travel for the purposes of your business is tax deductible. But not everyone remembers to keep track of all the mileage they use during the year. The Vehical App takes care of this for you, tracking the amount of mileage you do in your car and also logging any other travel related expenses such as parking, cleaning and repairs. It also keeps a log of your fuel consumption for the year and the cost of that fuel.
- Analytics: If you run your own website, chances are you use Google Analytics. Now keeping up to date with the analytics for your site has never been easier as you can bring them with you wherever you go. The Analytics app for the iPad offers clear, well laid out analytics reports that you can take into meetings or read on trains and is the only app for analytics with segmentation.
- Skype: Bring phone capabilities to your iPad with Skype for iPad. As well as offering phone calls it also features a face to face option similar to the iPad’s Facetime. Another essential free app.
Esther is a business blogger and writer. She blogs every week about business and finance issues covering everything from business loans to credit cards and from small business marketing to business apps. She also blogs about consumer finance for http://www.paydayloansuk.org.uk.