We are in the midst of it, right in between Thanksgiving and Christmas! The weather here finally resembles winter in Kansas City and we’ve finally had a little bit of snow! The weather combined with all of the Christmas music available in any local retailer is enough to win over any Scrooge. Or at least stress them out.

           The measly four weeks that separate Thanksgiving and Christmas seem to fly by faster by the year and it can be even more stressful for the small business owner. All of their personal holiday stressors acting in conjunction with their business demands can be more than overwhelming. Well, please relax! We have a few ideas on mobile phone applications to aid in the reduction of your holiday stressors this year.

            It is estimated that 137.50 million smart phone users will exist within the United States alone in 2013*. The is a tremendous percentage of users when the population of the country was 311.6 million as of July 2011**. That’s more than a third of the entirety of the population using a smartphone, age constraints have not been added in. Whew. That’s a lot of smart phone users and application availability.

 

At YCS Marketing we have come up with a concise list of mobile phone applications we find helpful for time, task, and monetary management.

• Mint: Mint is an awesome monetary tracker! You are able to connect with all of your accounts, loans, and investments. It even allows you to set up a budget. The application will deliver weekly account summaries that include information about your overall account balances and how you are spending your money with categorization of spending. You can manage it all from your phone or the web! We love this app!
• PayPal: The PayPal app gives you direct access to your PayPal account to check balances and schedule payments! For those utilizing PayPal as a payment receiver for their business would greatly benefit from this application.
• BillMinder: Despite this application costing $1.99, we feel its value is more than well worth it. BillMinder allows you to easily track your bills month to month with roll-over reminders and time trackers. This mobile app also offers pie chart or line graph reporting to easier review your bills over a period of time. BillMinder also works hand-in-hand with DebtMinder. There are a lot of different free Bill Reminding applications, we just happen to enjoy this one!
• HootSuite: We cannot praise HootSuite enough. Within our marketing department, we all actively utilize this application to manage our posts or double check things when we are not around. Easily allowing you to sync all of your social media profiles for ease in content sharing, this user-friendly application promotes uniformity. We love it.
• Evernote: Evernote is another awesome application that helps in project reminders and timelines. “Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your everyday life using your computer, phone, tablet and the web”- we couldn’t have said it better ourselves. They have quite a few life-hacker-esque applications that help make life a little easier from studying to business management.
• DropBox: For those who haven’t utilized any type of “cloud” system to keep track of their documents, photos, or any other file, should consider starting here. DropBox is a free application overall and is accessible from iPhone, Tablet, Android, PC, BlackBerry, iPad – you name it, they probably have an application or website for it. Our office utilizes DropBox to its entirety and it works very well for content and file management or sharing.
• Onavo: Onavo is an application that helps the smartphone user monitor their data usage. It will tell you which application is sucking the most life from your data plan and where you should be cutting back to avoid overage fees. Did we mention this was a FREE application??
• Pages+: Another FREE Facebook Application – manage your business pages on the go. This syncs directly to the business pages without you having to open the entire Facebook application and get sidetracked away from the original goal of updating your business pages’ status!
• USPS Mobile & FedEx Mobile & UPS Mobile: All of these applications are FREE! The Postal Service application gives you the most service options from scheduling a pick up to holding your mail; This is a really, really helpful application for businesses who ship a lot of product. FedEx has the best package tracking app period! Finally, UPS also allows the user to track packages, deliveries, get a quote and find a store! Whew!

 

*www.statista.com/statistics/201182/forecast-of-smartphone-users-in-the-us/

**www.google.com/publicdata URL