Some of our favourite digital apps to make your life easier.
Accounting & Business Finances
QuickBooks Online
I started using Quickbooks Online shortly after it was released in 2013. It has been incredible to watch it develop into a fully functional accounting software that can be the basis of a solution for small to medium businesses. While the platform itself is loaded with built in power, the advantage of cloud software is the almost limitless ability to integrate with other tools to build a custom system for a budget price.
Wave Accounting
For the smallest of budgets, Wave offers a great tool with an impressive set of features for free. This is an excellent option for solo-preneurs or contractors with simple invoicing and expense tracking needs.
Dext Prepare
A product affiliated with Quickbooks Online, Dext takes on the lion’s share of reducing paper receipt handling and data entry. Snap a photo with the phone app and your receipt is safely stored in your records. Dext also ‘reads’ the receipts so you don’t have to do data entry.
Hubdoc
A Dext competitor, Hubdoc offers a slightly less featured product for a slightly lower price. Depending on the features necessary, Hubdoc may be the choice for you!
Plooto
If you are still writing cheques, you have to give Plooto a whirl. This app sends effortless electronic payments to your suppliers without the limitations of e-transfers. We use it to pay bills on behalf of clients as it allows us to send the payment and invoice imagery to owners in a clear email for approval so we can set-up payments without direct bank access.
Float Cards
Float provides a fabulous product to eliminate employee expense reports from your business. They offer physical and virtual prepaid Visa cards that function like credit cards, but come with a full suite of controls to limit spending per card and per person. They are a great way to monitor your employees’ spending and allow them ease of use without having to pay for your expenses out of pocket.
MileIQ
Every business owner knows the struggle of tracking mileage. Affectionately known as ‘mileage Tinder’, this app tracks your vehicle trips and you simply swipe left or right to categorize them as business or personal. You end up with a CRA-compliant mileage log, which is better than what you get swiping on Tinder!
Personal Tax & Finances
Wealthsimple Tax Calculator
SimpleTax is a simple, online personal tax filing company that provides a free online personal tax calculator that will help you estimate your taxes owing. It will also show you what tax rate you will pay. I often use this as a simple tool to demonstrate the impact of RRSP contributions on your taxes paid.
Wealthica
If you have a lot of investments and bank accounts, Weathica is a free app that brings all of your account balances to one central place. You get a snapshot of your investment assets and net worth in simple graphs and charts that show change over time.
Business Management
Harvest
This is the time tracking and invoicing app that we use. If you set it up correctly, it gives a wide range of reports to help you track time, budgets and work efficiency across projects, clients and your team. It also produces invoices that sync directly to your Quickbooks Online.
Jobber
This app is a team management app targeted towards a business with several employees servicing clients - residential cleaning or landscaping services are a great example. Scheduling, time tracking, expense tracking and invoicing are included with client communication features. This app also has a great Quickbooks Online integration.
Checkfront
This Vancouver based company has developed an affordable online booking software that really can’t be beat for features and financial reporting. Online availability and booking for events, activities or accommodation are its specialty with a range of integration options including Quickbooks Online.
BookingLayer
This booking software is a fantastic option for businesses that offer a premium product, accommodation plus services packages, and need a high level of pre-booking guest contact. It functions as a CRM, time block scheduler, communication platform and integrates with some great payment processors. They are a small team of people dedicated to making premium vacation packages run smoothly for guests and operators.
Flywire
This payment processor originated to fill the niche of transferring international payments for students, but quickly realized there was a larger demand for transferring payments across borders without paying credit card fees. Have your clients pay in their own currency and save on fees.
Interpodia
Membership and event registration is easy with this Vancouver-based company that has expanded internationally. This is a great option for minimizing administration time for handling memberships as a not-for-profit organization. It can even be set up to issue charitable donation receipts. After the initial set-up, packages are available that charge a usage fee per transaction which makes the platform free to use for the not-for-profit.
SquareUp
Everyone’s favourite payment processor, SquareUp offers a point of sale that uses a per transaction fee payment model. This is a great and feature-rich solution for smaller businesses with lower transaction volume who don’t need to pay for a more complex point of sale.
Minute7
Time tracking made simple, Minute7 provides a phone app for your employees to track their time spent on client projects, expenses incurred and mileage so you can accurately prepare invoices, payroll and reimbursements.
Quickbooks Time
Quickbooks Time is similar to Minute7, but has a full-featured set of services that come at a higher price point. Some more complex needs warrant this app over Minute7.
Productivity & Organization
Asana
Asana is a fantastic free tool for project management that allows you to create multi-layered project plans and tasks and assign sections to yourself and others with deadlines to ensure nothing gets missed. I used this before switching to an accounting specific project management tool called Karbon.
SignNow
If you are struggling to decide which digital signature tool to use, I recommend SignNow. Full of features, SignNow is a more cost effective version of DocuSign. If fast turnover of signatures on documents is important, then this app will save you hours every month.
Calendly
I use Calendly to let people choose open times in my schedule to meet. This free app lets you restrict the number of meetings per day, buffers between meetings and also integrates to automatically add video conferencing details when sending a meeting confirmation.
Zapier
If you are really into process building, but not quite savvy enough to develop an API, Zapier is for you. This app has thousands of integrations and plays translator for apps that don’t have a direct integration. Automate repetitive tasks that take up time and are easy to forget for maximum efficiency and process creation.