Top 10 iOS and Android Productivity Apps for Small and Medium Businesses

Large businesses often rely on custom-made software in their processes and pay exorbitant prices for the same. Even most ready-made solutions of enterprise-grade are really expensive. These prices can become prohibitive for smaller and medium-sized businesses who don’t have as much money to throw around. Here are some apps on Android and iOS that are perfect to improve productivity in small and medium businesses.

1. Slack

A messaging platform tailor-made for enterprise and professional use. Apart from simple and seamless messaging and file-sharing, the app integrates with various tools and services that support workflows like financial reporting and multi-currency transactions through third-party add-ons. While Slack itself doesn’t generate reports or calculate taxes, its ecosystem of integrations allows SMBs to connect with apps like QuickBooks or Xero to streamline communication around these tasks.

2. Canva

SMBs often don’t have the luxury of affording specialized marketing agents and firms to create media for them. Canva, being a simple drag-and-drop graphic design tool, can be the perfect app to fulfil your needs. The owner themselves, or any employee, can get near professional-grade media outputs with apt usage of a good phone camera and Canva, even in the free version.

3. Google Workspace

For businesses that are just starting out, the simple and unassuming Google environment can turn out to be a powerful tool. It offers a lot of the basic functionalities required in running a business, is compatible with nearly every device, and costs absolutely nothing. It wouldn’t be too farfetched to assume that most SMBs could likely make do with just Google Workspace, instead of pricey, proprietary ERPs and CRMs.

4. Odoo

Odoo is an open-source business software suite that aims to provide applications for all your business needs, including sales, accounting, inventory, employee management, etc. As a jack-of-all-trades model, it can be an affordable alternative to buying several specialized software for each task or requirement.

5. Monday.com

Monday.com is a cloud-based project and work management platform geared towards planning and managing projects and tracking day-to-day workplace activities, tasks, and duties. Among the many CRMs out there, it’s one of the most intuitive and user-friendly ones, with some nifty features to boot. One such feature is automatically notifying the next person in a workflow when the previous task is completed, which subtly saves a lot of time.

6. Funnel

Funnel is one of the best apps for sales and marketing automation. It integrates with all marketing and advertising platforms, allowing data to be fed anywhere. It can automatically feed data into Business Intelligence Tools, Data Warehouses, Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, Google Analytics, and many other visualization tools.

7. Calendly

Calendly is an online appointment scheduling software. It syncs with your various calendars and identifies your availabilities, allowing people to schedule appointments and meetings with you at no risk of encountering the cursed double-booking. While it can be useful when deployed internally, it will be most prominent in parts of the business that involve direct contact with clients and customers.

8. LastPass

Even the largest businesses go through great troubles to keep their systems secure, yet lose out with the simple human error of leaking passwords. LastPass allows you to save all your passwords and use one “master password” along with 2FA to log in to your accounts. With the varying levels of access that need managing in a business, services like LastPass can avoid a lot of complications.

9. Microsoft Teams

The app gained its fame during the Covid-19 pandemic and initially came with a lot of frustrations. Now, however, Microsoft Teams has been fully fleshed out into a top-notch productivity tool that many businesses rely on for communication, file-sharing, meetings, scheduling, etc.

10. Grammarly

Grammarly has always been an under-appreciated aid to many. Its solitary use-case of grammar checking seems simple, but can incrementally save a lot of time in the business workflow. No longer having to re-check every word of an email, message, or press release before sending it is a small, but effective and reliable contribution to the process that should not be passed up. And now, with the introduction of Grammarly AI that can write and edit for you, it is even more crucial to have on every employee’s device.

(Written and compiled by Advit Gaur)