Five business apps to boost your work

Almost everyone owns a smartphone nowadays, and business executives are no exception. Smartphones help these hotshot executives and desk workers stay connected to the world around them, feeding them updates and emails on demand. If you're playing Angry Birds on your i-Phone every chance you get, it's not really the best use of your smartphone in the workplace, is it? Save the gaming for the ride home from work or winding down when you get home, and stock up on the following apps to stay on pace with your work.

Expensify: The program tracks your expenditure, on anything, anywhere. Simplified and watered down for ease of use, it can be used by accountants or messy spenders, and help you keep track of budgets. Streamline the way your employees report expenses, the way expenses are approved, and the way you export that information to your accounting package. Helps you out when you need to plan those pesky office parties and keep track of the expenses. Can be used to keep track of personal expenses as well, and a good idea if you keep wondering where your salary goes every month.

Log Me In: Log in, manage and modify content on any of your devices, on the go. Left an important file back home? Don't want to sit through another one of the tiring telling-offs from your boss? Use Log Me In to log in to your PC at home from another device and retrieve files at ease from your workplace. The app comes in handy if you're running late and transferring files would otherwise take ages. Just get to the meeting in time, download your presentation to your device using the app, and voila! The app requires synching with devices, and the other device needs to be turned on for you to retrieve files.

Dropbox: A lot like Log Me In, but mostly used for sharing a common storage space between users. The app runs in the background, and every time a file is changed from another location, the file is automatically updated on your computer as well. This helps bringing together an entire workforce and keeps them in sync, and removes the need for forwarding emails and transferring using pendrives. Dropbox requires an internet connection to work, obviously, but what business executive in this day and age isn't connected to the web?

Leaf: This is one for the small scale business owners. The Customer Relations Manger (CRM) app saves your time by keeping an inventory of your products and takes orders, notifies you, and keeps count of how much money you stand to make. Any range of products you might have, the app molds its services around it. It will also track how well your business is doing, and provide funky, eye-catching graphs, facts and figures if you need to review how you're doing.

Harvest: Your employer won't run after you trying to get you to be more productive at the workplace. At best, a couple of warnings later, you will be unceremoniously kicked out, and when you're nursing a bruised behind, you'll most probably blame your love of surfing through the net for cat memes. Before that happens, get a grip on your online habits using Harvest. The app bombards you with information about your online activity, showing you which sites you waste most of your time on. If you're getting complains about your work rate, maybe its time to reassess your priorities, and Harvest tells you where to cut down your online activity.