I hate to say it, but my addicted to my phone! The first step is admitting it right…
Since I basically live on my phone, naturally that means that I use it for business as much as for personal use. Of course I use it to call and text clients or answer emails & check my business Facebook page. However, for the most part (other than calling) I can do all of those things from my computer. I could live without those apps on my phone (minus texting I guess too haha – but that’s a given). There are however 5 Phone Apps I wouldn’t be able to run my business without!  I thought I would share them with you guys because they make my life so much better!!

Scannable
I use this app for accounting purposes mainly. This is a scanner on your phone! So go into the app, take a picture of a receipt, the app then transforms that picture into a pdf file. From there I can email myself the file and drop it into my computer files where I store all my business receipts. I can do it immediately after I get the receipt at the restaurant or at the atm instead of waiting to sit down in front of my scanning printer and spend hours scanning a bunch of files. It’s also super helpful for the occasional vendor contract that I need to sign and email back to the venue.

Notes
Oh my gosh – this app houses about 25 individual notes at the moment and pretty much all of them at business related notes! From keeping track of the order of which shoot needs to be edited and what the deadline date for it is, what needs to be blogged, my business to-do list for the year, my instagram tags, and just a ton of other notes of reminders and thoughts or ideas as they come to me.

Dropbox
I love this app! I store all my files in dropbox instead of on my computer – this way I can access any of the files anywhere and not just when I have my computer in front of me. During a wedding I can drop the timeline here so that if the paper copy gets misplaced I’m not totally lost. But a big use of this is so that I can drop images onto dropbox and then from dropbox save them to my phone so that I can post them to instagram.

Instagram
Speaking of instagram – let’s face it, while you can access it from your computer, this is very much a phone app and really only a phone app. It is one of my biggest forms of marketing and there is no way I could ever run my business without instagram and it’s marketing abilities!

MileIQ
This guy is a lifesaver!!! I was terrible at remembering that I needed to look at my odometer before I left for a business related trip (shoot, meeting, etc) and writing that down and then looking at it before I got out of the car. So I never did it, instead I would sit in front of google maps at the end of the year and map out my trips, FROM THE WHOLE YEAR!!! It was terrible! I know I missed miles and forgot trips and didn’t get the tax write offs that I should’ve been getting for my car. So then I discovered this beautiful app – it runs in the background of your phone all the time and surprisingly barely uses data – so at the end of the month or even this past year the year, all of my trips were on my online dashboard. Instead of having to track addresses on google maps, I just went into my calendar and referenced dates when I was on a shoot and clicked “business” and it tracks it for me. But that nice thing, if I could remember to after a trip, swipe left or right – it would immediately track that as business or personal and I would be done for the year. Once you’ve finished classifying the drives, you request an excel spreadsheet and it put its all down in a pdf form for you to hand right over to your accountant. All done!