Being a freelancer can be messy sometimes especially if you are not a fan of maintaining a personal desk. The freedom that comes with a freelance career can be a bit of nuisance if you cannot organize yourself properly. As the saying goes, “what’s the reason to fret when technology is there to help” therefore, keeping in view the difficulties that you (as a freelancer) can face, I have compiled a list of five free iPhone apps that will (hopefully) prove quite useful to you.
One of the dark sides of technology, as argued by a large populace, is that it has made us quite lazy. Not so long ago, maintaining business cards of your contacts were not that difficult but now it has become a nightmare (at-least for some). So to overcome the problem created by the “evil technology” (yeah, it is in our nature to find scapegoats for every problem we face), we are going to summon the “good technology”.
Meet Shoeboxed Business Card Reader, your new highly skilled assistant in keeping and managing your clientele’s business cards. All you have to do is to snap a picture of the business card you want to keep and let your “assistant” do the rest. It will extract the important contact details like name, address, phone number, email, etc through OCR and will verify the info from you before saving. The app also has the option to share the contact info with other popular contact management apps like BatchBook or Google Contacts. Considering the fact that the price tag doesn’t bother your wallet at all, this app is a must have.
Keeping a track of one’s work hours is a must in any freelancer’s life because it helps in creating an invoice with accurate billing information and with Paymo, performing this task will be a piece of cake. All you have to do is to signup for a free account at http://Paymo.biz and you are all set to keep track of your precious time during client meetings or while working on tasks. Two of the features which I really like about this app are
Being a freelancer, you have to send countless invoices to your clients every month. Creating a professional looking invoice is a tedious task and sometimes you’ll feel that you have wasted (and are wasting) quite a lot of time in creating and forwarding them to your customers. Not anymore my friend, its time to utilize the services of Quick Invoice. This handy app will let you create and send invoices to your clientele in just an instant, without any trouble. Choose the client to whom you want to send the invoice, the service, mode of payment, applicable taxes, and the client will receive the invoice via email in PDF format.
How many times have you gotten a “bill shock” simply because your apps used a huge chunk of data; enough to force you to lighten your wallet a bit more? Don’t worry; you can avoid these undesirable situations with My Data Manager, a very handy app that lets you monitor the data usage of your apps. You can set threshold alarms so that you’ll be informed whenever one of your apps crosses the redline. You can also create your own ideal package according to your requirements; all you have to do is to feed the info about the total data limit and let the app do the rest for you. Living in time of recession (with no end in sight, at-least for the time being), every penny you save is every penny you earn so I would strongly recommend to get this app as soon as you can.
It is my habit to do a quick go through of my PowerPoint files on my iPhone when I’m at the coffee house simply because it gives me quite a lot of solid points that I can use to further improve my presentation. You can also do it without spending a dime by Office2 Plus, an app by which you can view your Word, Excel and PowerPoint files right from your iPhone. Though I’m not a big fan of editing my files on my iPhone, if you want to create, edit or save files, you have to pay a small fee (one time only) to enable full functionality of the app.
I hope that these apps will turn out to be some of the best assets for your freelance career. So give them a try and let us know what you think about them.
Shoeboxed Business Card Reader and Business Card Scanner
One of the dark sides of technology, as argued by a large populace, is that it has made us quite lazy. Not so long ago, maintaining business cards of your contacts were not that difficult but now it has become a nightmare (at-least for some). So to overcome the problem created by the “evil technology” (yeah, it is in our nature to find scapegoats for every problem we face), we are going to summon the “good technology”.
Meet Shoeboxed Business Card Reader, your new highly skilled assistant in keeping and managing your clientele’s business cards. All you have to do is to snap a picture of the business card you want to keep and let your “assistant” do the rest. It will extract the important contact details like name, address, phone number, email, etc through OCR and will verify the info from you before saving. The app also has the option to share the contact info with other popular contact management apps like BatchBook or Google Contacts. Considering the fact that the price tag doesn’t bother your wallet at all, this app is a must have.
Paymo
Keeping a track of one’s work hours is a must in any freelancer’s life because it helps in creating an invoice with accurate billing information and with Paymo, performing this task will be a piece of cake. All you have to do is to signup for a free account at http://Paymo.biz and you are all set to keep track of your precious time during client meetings or while working on tasks. Two of the features which I really like about this app are
i.) its ability to work in offline mode (it will synchronize to your online account whenever a connection becomes available)
ii.) its price tag.Quick Invoice
Being a freelancer, you have to send countless invoices to your clients every month. Creating a professional looking invoice is a tedious task and sometimes you’ll feel that you have wasted (and are wasting) quite a lot of time in creating and forwarding them to your customers. Not anymore my friend, its time to utilize the services of Quick Invoice. This handy app will let you create and send invoices to your clientele in just an instant, without any trouble. Choose the client to whom you want to send the invoice, the service, mode of payment, applicable taxes, and the client will receive the invoice via email in PDF format.
My Data Manager
How many times have you gotten a “bill shock” simply because your apps used a huge chunk of data; enough to force you to lighten your wallet a bit more? Don’t worry; you can avoid these undesirable situations with My Data Manager, a very handy app that lets you monitor the data usage of your apps. You can set threshold alarms so that you’ll be informed whenever one of your apps crosses the redline. You can also create your own ideal package according to your requirements; all you have to do is to feed the info about the total data limit and let the app do the rest for you. Living in time of recession (with no end in sight, at-least for the time being), every penny you save is every penny you earn so I would strongly recommend to get this app as soon as you can.
Office2 Plus
It is my habit to do a quick go through of my PowerPoint files on my iPhone when I’m at the coffee house simply because it gives me quite a lot of solid points that I can use to further improve my presentation. You can also do it without spending a dime by Office2 Plus, an app by which you can view your Word, Excel and PowerPoint files right from your iPhone. Though I’m not a big fan of editing my files on my iPhone, if you want to create, edit or save files, you have to pay a small fee (one time only) to enable full functionality of the app.
I hope that these apps will turn out to be some of the best assets for your freelance career. So give them a try and let us know what you think about them.
