Smartphones have become a powerful tool for small business owners.
With the right selection of apps, you can run your business from your smartphone no matter where you are, using what little time you have as a business owner.
From bookings to accounting to marketing, you can do it all from your smartphone.
Contents
Perks of Using a Smartphone For Business
Working from a smartphone is becoming increasingly common for many small businesses as we move into a digital work era. Business owners and their staff are starting to see the benefits of smartphone technology, such as decreased operating costs and new ways of connecting with clients and staff.
Business owners no longer need to invest their money in expensive technology when they first open their businesses. Instead, they can use existing technologies, like their smartphones, to run their business. A subscription for a business app is far cheaper than buying a work computer and an old, expensive software to run on it.
Small business owners often say they don’t have enough time to get through their business administration. It’s true that they don’t have one hour or two hour blocks in their day to sit at their computer and manually enter all their business admin. However, they do have a spare five minutes here and there between tasks. That’s why smartphones are great because you always have one on you and it only takes a few minutes to complete that one admin task that’s been bugging you.
Smartphones are also great for connecting with people. That includes your customers and your staff. Social media apps and communication apps make it quick and easy to reach out to your staff about important work information. It’s also opened up the opportunity for more flexibility in working remotely. These apps are also great for marketing your business and communicating with customers as messages sent through these apps have a much higher open and engagement rate. They also form a more personal relationship with your customers than emailing does.
How to Do Business Using a Smartphone?
Bill your clients
To increase the chance of your clients paying you, you need to bill them straight away. That means you need a quick way of sending them an invoice. If you don’t have time to go to your office and create one, another option is a simple invoice app like Bookipi. This app lets you create invoices, receipts, estimates and more in under a minute. You can save your customers and items to make the process even easier the next time. You don’t need to be in an office to use Bookipi. All you need is your smartphone and a few minutes of your time to bill your clients.
Track expenses and receipts
Tracking expenses and receipts is something that most business owners struggle with. It’s the kind of chore that you forget about once and then all of a sudden you need to spend hours on it to get it in order again. With an expense tracker app for your smartphone, you can simply add an expense when you receive it and take a photo of your receipts and store it with the relevant expense. If you choose a good expense tracker, you can sync your bank feed and your transactions will get stored and sorted for you.
Social networking channels and software like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and others have a host of fresh and exclusive marketing opportunities. You can use your social media page to communicate with your existing customers and share updates or completed work with them. You can also use it to reach new customers when you pay for social media ads. The great thing about social media ads is that you can customise the region and the demographic of the people you target to match your target audience.
Take bookings
Managing your calendar and your workload can be tough without a good tool. As much as everyone likes to deny it, you can’t manage everything in your head. A bookings app will help you manage your bookings, time and workload all from your smartphone. Some apps will even automatically add in the time you need to travel from one job to another. A bookings app will also be helpful in the future should you ever need to look back and see when you worked a particular job or how many jobs you did within a certain period.
Find work and advertise your services on a jobs app
With the way we do business becoming more digital, the way people find the right business to hire is also becoming more digital. There are a ton of apps that act as online directories and let you list your business and services. You can use these to find new jobs and reach new customers. You might not get lots of work from one stream but if you use a range of these apps, you’ll greatly increase your chances of getting new work.
Roster staff
You and your staff can download a rostering app to manage who is working when and for how long they are working for. They can use these apps to clock in and out, removing the need for handwritten timesheets. They’ll also get notifications delivered to their phones so they’ll have no excuses about not seeing the roster.
Communicate with customers
Smartphones have added new ways of communicating with our customers. Social media apps and instant messaging are now also being used for business use rather than just personal use. While some people prefer to communicate via email or over the phone, texting and messaging feels more personal and has a better engagement and open rate than emails and you’re not dependent on the client being free at that exact moment like phone calls. You can also use public social media pages to send out customer communications if you have any breaking news that will stop you doing your work, i.e. weather conditions.
There are many ways to do business using a handy smartphone. Choose the best way for the business!
