If you are a modern day road warrior, chances are you use a smartphone or two, a laptop and probably a tablet as well. And, you need to have these on you when you travel for business. But what good is this medley of devices if you can’t leverage them to make your life easier and your business process smoother.

Here are a handful of apps which will take care of the hundred and more things that you need to manage while away on business.

Contact Management

What’s the point in having a hundred contacts, if you can’t recall their details the moment you really need it? When face with this situation, Brewster comes to the rescue. It syncs across your contacts list on the phone, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on and makes the details available to you at all times. All your Brewster contacts will still be available in auto-complete mode in case you want to sens a quick message, email or even make a phone call. The only downside is this app is currently available only for Apple products.

Networking

Networking is one of the most crucial aspects of managing and promoting a business. Most people only have the chance to do so at seminars and conference but there’s an app which will help you network with business travellers even when you’re just chilling at the coffee shop. Here on Biz keeps track of your business activities and say you’re travelling to London to attend an event, the moment you land, the app will alert you to people who might be heading to the same event so you can instantly connect with them over a simple IM. It even alerts you to people who might be working in the same profession as you do or attended the same college as you did!

Money matters

Keeping track of how much you spend, where you spent it and how much was your money or the company’s can be a big hassle! While most of us tend to try and save all our bills and write the transactions down in as much detail as we can, it’s impossible to keep track of every penny while travelling. Expensify is a one-stop app that lets you log your expenses, capture receipt images and manage financial accounts on the go. A special SmartScan feature will let you capture details from a paper receipt, automatically fill out expense details and create a new expense. It can even ascribe certain expenses to a particular card transaction, so you have no confusion as to who spent the money. Apart form finances, it will even track your fuel expenses via GPS or an odometer entry and add it to compensation bills. And if you think, you’ve splurged too much on a trip, Expensify will even create charts for you to analyse your spending across multiple categories.

Cam Scanner

The point of being a mobile professional is to keep baggage to a minimum. You can’t cut down on the essentials but your documents, files, tickets, business contacts can all be carried in the digital form. Not just that, new articles you read, new contacts you gain or just an infograph you see somewhere can also be instantly stored on your smart device. CamScanner does just that with the help of your device’s camera.

You can launch the app, take a picture of a receipt, note, invoices or business cards and it’ll automatically get saved in your digital files.

The documents which you save can be synced with your cloud services (Google Drive, Dropbox and the likes) so you can access them on any web-enabled device. You can even access these from multiple devices connected through Wi-Fi or iTunes.

In case it’s not documents but just business cards you have trouble going through and cataloguing for use later, you’ve got help. In any case, carrying physical cards to share seems slightly redundant in an age when everything’s digital. Apps such as CardMunch let you quickly scan a business card and then automatically save the various details such as address or phone numbers in the respective fields in your smartphone or tablet.

Stay connected

Most airports and cafés these days have free Wi-Fi. But what if you’re stuck in a new place without any idea how to hook on to the internet? Apps such as the Wi-Fi Scanner will desperately look for Wi-Fi hotspots around you so you can connect to your virtual life as quickly as possible. You can get details of every public wireless network around you, call the location and even follow directions to get there. This obviously works both online and offline and even tells you which one’s the strongest network around to connect to in the vicinity!

So, the next time you’re packing for a business trip, don’t forget to pack in these apps for convenience!

mahananda.bohidar@thehindu.co.in

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