Four Mobile Apps for Business Travelers

When it comes to travel, small business owners don’t have the luxury to sweat the little stuff. Often expense receipts pile up, mileage goes untracked and time is wasted in airports waiting for delayed flights, all of which means lost money to the business owner. To prevent that from happening on your next business trip, here’s four mobile travel apps that will save you money without breaking the bank.

TripIt

One of the biggest production sappers is sitting in an airport waiting for your flight to take off. In the perfect world you would have known the flight was delayed for three hours and would have planned accordingly, but for many small businesses owners hopping from meeting to meeting to airport, that doesn’t happen. For $49 a year TripIt organizes your travel plans into an itinerary that keeps all the details in one place. With the app, you can share itineraries with co-workers, get mobile alerts about flight delays, cancellations and gate changes and alternate flights including flight status and open seats.

Shoeboxed

Small business owners know they can write off travel expenses, but how many times do they lose their receipts. Same goes for networking. They may make a great contact but end up losing the business card. That’s where the Shoeboxed app comes in. With the app you can take a picture of a receipt or business card with your phone and Shoeboxed will handle the rest. All of the expenses and contact data is automatically extracted from the pictures and posted in your account.

Billpark

Keeping track of what client owes what can be tough on any given day, but down right impossible when you are out of the office. The Billpark invoicing keeps you in the loop when you are “away from your desk.” With the app you’ll know instantly when a client looks at a bill, a co-worker makes a comment about an invoice, or payment is received. The app also lets you create and edit invoices, send them to customers and receive payment in the same screen. Because the app gives you an overview of every payment, you’ll know which clients pays on time, which ones are late and who you’ve made the most money off of in the past year.

Trip Cubby Mileage Log for Tax Deduction or Reimbursement

Road trips don’t have to cost a small business owner since the mileage they put on their car can be written off as a business expense. Trip Cubby Mileage Log for Tax Deduction or Reimbursement app makes it easy to keep track of how many miles you put on your car traveling from meeting to meeting. Designed with IRS compliance in mind, the app lets you input miles, create excel compatible email reports, sort, filter and search trips and view charts of deduction categories, mileage and paid vs. unpaid. The developers created the app after numerous failed attempts of keeping track of mileage on paper. The app was designed to be fast and easy to use.