“The great growling engine of change. Technology.” - Alvin Toffler

At last count, we use 23 different apps to help run our marketing agency.

We use apps for just about everything - from personal productivity and remote team communications to training and development, strategic brainstorming, and even bookkeeping

We have zero affiliation with any of the apps we mention, and we don't earn a penny from mentioning any of them. Happily, this means our views are based only on our own experience and completely unbiased

Here are five of our favorite apps that you should consider using in your business:

DEXT - Formerly Receipt Bank

We LOVE this app for helping us get rid of paper receipts and burying our bookkeeper, and automating the entire bookkeeping process. You take a photo of the receipt and send it to a pre-determined email address. It reads the amount, categorizes it, and voila your financial team is happy again and so are the trees. You can use this app for e-receipts as well as paper.

Sadly the company behind this app took some poor branding advice and rebranded entirely - from Receipt Bank (brilliant and descriptive) to the totally non-descript name of Dext. Why the name Dext? We have no idea. It reminds us of the serial killer TV program called Dexter ... We're always sad when we see a good company get lost by doing a terrible rebrand...SIGH ... anyhow the app is still good and worth a try.

ASANA

We have trialed a LOT of project management software applications - Trello, Airtable, Basecamp, Zoho, Monday.com, Scoro, Microsoft Project.

Hands down, we have found Asana to be the best to run our agency using. It’s also used by Amazon, PayPal, Under Armor, Spotify …

Asana is intuitive to learn (you don't have to watch hours of video tutorials). It's flexible, scalable and gasp, is even fun to use (think unicorns flying across your screen when a task is completed).

You decide who gets access to what on your team, you can add in vendors, suppliers and contractors, which makes this app your HQ dashboard for everything. With just a quick glance you can see which projects are on track and which are in danger. Asana also integrates beautifully at the back end with dropbox, Sales force and hundreds of other software apps. We use Asana for help with team brainstorming, project planning, project management, process management, marketing systems design …so many uses!

Voxer

This app is like having a walkie-talkie function on your phone. But, instead of sending text messages, you can use Voxer to send recorded messages and your recipient can access it when it's convenient. How is this different from voicemail? Well it's instant for a start (voicemails are often delayed), it doesn't interrupt your recipient's day by calling them first, and when you're the recipient, you get to decide when you listen which means it's a great tool to use to run coaching and training programs. You can also add Voxer to your website so visitors can leave you a voice message!

This brings us to the next app that we love so very much...

Loom 

We LOVE Loom. We use loom to do screen recordings, create training or systemize our procedures. We use it to create training videos for clients (for example, how to manage their new website and post easily post content). We use Loom to create social media content, record video blogs ... the list of uses for Loom is endless. 

Otter AI

We use Otter as a personal transcriptionist. If you're more comfortable speaking than writing, using Otter can be a game-changer to increase your personal productivity. It's also great to transcribe meetings with or create to-do lists (that can then be added to Asana - see above). Is this as good as having an actual human to do the transcriptionist work? No. That's why we don't use it for critical business such as transcribing an interview to turn into a Lunch Break Book for one of our clients. But its AI functionality is certainly good enough to capture your own pearls of wisdom and those of your team when brainstorming or planning your next big project.

And there you have it -our current Top 5 favorite business apps to grow and manage your business. Happy ‘apping!