Ashley Small’s Top 5 Apps for Fly Female Entrepreneurs on the Go

By In Her Shoes Contributor: Ashley Small

 Ashley Small of Medley Inc. | Photo Credit: Debbie Porter

As an entrepreneur, one of the greatest challenges is balancing meetings, networking, and business development with actual execution. All of it’s necessary to thrive in business, but sometimes there’s just not enough time in the day.

Some of these are old time favorites and some (I’m convinced) are highly underrated. Here are my top five apps for CEO’s on the go.

1. FreshBooks. If you’re in an industry that requires logging billable hours, get Freshbooks now. It’s easy to use, cloud-based which allows you to use it on multiple devices and allows for basic accounting. You can send invoices, create balance sheets and it syncs with ZenPayroll; which is my top pick for accounting apps for creatives, but I’ll save that for another post.
2. Flipboard. To stay in the know about the latest trends in the industry, I  spend about 15 minutes at the top of the day catching up on the latest news in tech, PR and entrepreneurship. Flipboard aggregrates articles from your favorite digital magazines and blogs, in addition to social media content. It’s interface is beautiful and easy to navigate, and they recently added 34,000 topics to follow.
3. Refresh. Sometimes the hours just roll together, and you look up just in enough time to head into a big meeting with a new contact. Refresh makes use of the information on your local calendar, email account and contacts to send you notifications about the person you’re scheduled to meet. Like Flipboard, it works an aggregrator, but just for the things you need to know about your peers and potential clients.
4. Audible. There’s no such thing as too much information and every second matters. Audible’s not new to the game, but the greatest value I’ve seen is the ability to listen in while I’m on the go; in the car in between meetings, in the morning while getting dressed and early in the morning before our team arrives to the office. (Sidenote: current downloads include Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, Daring Greatly by Brene Brown and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries)
5. Google Products. All of them. In our office, we use Google Products for project managements- as many and as frequently as possible. Our business email is hosted on Gmail, we use Google Drive for collaboration and document sharing, Google Voice for calls and Google Calendar for task management. Have no clue what life would be like without Google Products. Lifehacker has a great guide on using Google Calendar for project management.

These are just a few of my daily essentials. What are your top apps for business?