5 iOS Business Apps to Stay Organized

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5 iOS Business Apps to Help You Stay Organized

Staying organized is key to a successful workday. So why not use your iPhone to do it? Your iOS device can help you manage your email inbox, take notes and even balance your books. But it's also great at simply keeping you on task and organized. If you need help organizing your long-term calendar, your daily business meetings or even your paper receipts, there's an app that can help. Read on for five of the best organizational apps for iPhone and iPad.

Keep your calendar organized

Fantastical 2 ($1.99)

A good calendar might be the best tool to help you organize your work life, and Fantastical 2 is one of the best calendar apps on iOS, available in both iPhone and iPad versions. It improves upon the stock calendar app with a deep feature set and an easy-to-use interface. It mirrors the basic functionality of other good calendar apps, letting you sort your calendar by day, week, month or year, and quickly drill down to view individual event details. Fantastical 2 also supports voice commands, and lets you add events using natural speech, such as "Meet Susan for lunch at 1 p.m. on Thursday." The app will automatically parse your sentence and fill in the relevant details, and when it comes time for the event, you'll receive an automated alert. Plus, the intuitive interface offers handy functionality like the ability to reorder events across multiple days by simply dragging and dropping them.

Keep your notes organized

Evernote (Free)

To keep your notes organized, paper notebooks just won't cut it anymore. A good note-taking app like Evernoteis a better option for business users who want to stay organized. This app lets you dictate or manually enter notes, snap photos or even draw in notes using a capacitive stylus. The app's text-identification functionality can recognize and index printed and handwritten text, so you can search for specific words printed in a PDF, typed in a memo or scrawled on a piece of paper. And since Evernote is available for just about every computing platform — including iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mac and PC — your notes will be automatically synced across all your work devices. This happens whether you're at home or in the office. That way, you can always find your notes in a single place, and you can really stay organized.

Keep your agenda organized

Schedule Planner (Free)

Staying on top of your long-term schedule is the first step in getting organized. But managing the minutiae of your daily agenda can be just as important. Schedule Planneris a solid app for iOS that helps you focus on what you need to get done today, also providing tools to help you spend your time wisely. It starts with an easy-to-use interface that lets you plan your day each morning by placing items in color-coded categories, such as Work and Free Time. You can pull up a chart whenever you'd like to see where your time is going at a glance, which can really help you get back on track. And like any good day-planner app, Schedule Planner includes the ability to set customer alerts so you never miss an appointment. It also lets you add recurring daily tasks that will carry over to later dates.

Keep your paper documents organized

Shoeboxed (Free with Shoeboxed subscription, starting at $10/month)

Keeping your receipts, bills and other financial documents organized isn't easy. But an app like Shoeboxed for iOS makes the process more manageable. This app lets you upload any paper document by snapping a photo with the camera on your iPhone or iPad. The app uses text-recognition software to extract the important data, including vendor, date, total amount and payment type. It then uses that information to create a fully searchable database of your transactions. Using this app takes a bit of effort up front, but uploading your documents to Shoeboxed can pay off in a major way when it's time to file your taxes. It saves you time, since finding a particular document in a digital database is quicker and easier than fumbling through stacks of paper. And it can save you money, since hiring someone to manage your paper documents isn't cheap.

Keep your meetings organized

Mynd (Free)

The easiest route to an organized business meeting is to make sure that everyone is on the same page before the meeting even starts, and Agenda Makerfor iOS can help you do this. The app lets you create and edit detailed outlines for each meeting, and it makes reordering items on each agenda as easy as dragging and dropping them. You also have the ability to tweak how much time is allotted for each item to ensure your meeting stays on track. When you finish your agenda, you can send it out to all attendees via email with a few taps. Agenda Maker also lets you send the agenda to others who have the Agenda Maker app on their iPhones or iPads, so you can edit collaboratively.