We have released an updated version of the #MyClock app to the iOS and Android app stores. The #MyClock app gives employees the power to clock in and out with or without GPS and Photos.
The attendance export functionality is still the same within your PayrollHero account, but watch for an update coming shortly that upgrades the report and makes it more useful.
Check out the new #MyClock below;
Running a business is tough. If you are in Singapore, where the labour crunch is putting a strain on your resources, you cannot be spending time on administrative work.
Leveraging on technology has multiple benefits: you can access your work wherever you go; saving your work on the Cloud means that you have less chance of losing it if your computer crashes; you will be more efficient and less error-prone.
Using apps is the way to go in a place like Singapore where everyone is tech-enabled.
We have brought you 12 apps that can help you run your business:
Evernote is an app that helps you record text, audio recordings, notes, reminders and pictures on the Cloud. You can access it from any device and it is free up to a certain limit. Evernote also allows you to collaborate by sharing files with other Evernote users.
The app can be used offline and when you connect to the Internet, the app will automatically upload your files to the Cloud. Evernote is a great way to organize your thoughts now, and take action later.
If your company is using Gmail, Google Drive is a must. You can share documents, spreadsheets and presentations within the company or among a few members by customizing permissions to files.
While Google Apps for Work is not free, the range of products available to you make the subscription worth your while.
This is an awesome project-based software. It’s free and does away with meaningless sticky-notes, spreadsheets and email chains. Trello is a great app to collaborate and track progress in a project. Trello allows you to integrate with Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive.
You can set notifications and make checkists to stay on top of your work. You can also create team to manage people working on Trello. Altogether, Trello makes for a great app that can boost productivity at the workplace.
Oftentimes, you need to file and submit forms for administrative work: whether you are incorporating your business or filing taxes. A great way to scan and store your official documents is by using CamScanner.
The app is free and lets you scan documents on your phone. You might be wondering why this is a step up from taking a picture of the document. CamScanner adds filters to the picture and automatically makes it look like a scanned version of the document. You can email the document to anyone as a JPEG or PDF file. You can also just save it on the app and access it online from any device.
For business owners who travel frequently, Tripit saves your itinerary in one place and lets you access it easily. Tripit also gives you weather updates and maps to your destinations. Tripit is free for a few features like saving your plans in one place, syncing plans with your calendar and editing plans manually.
The paid version allows you to track frequent flier miles and share your plans with friends.
Hipchat is a communication platform for your employees. It is free if you use the basic service where you can have chat rooms based on the functions of your business (marketing, sales, operations, etc). Hipchat is user friendly and only $2 per user per month for the full service. That includes video chat an screen sharing.
This is an interesting app, mostly useful for you as a manager. The app runs in the background and tracks what you are working on. It sends weekly and monthly reports.
This helps you compare what you plan to prioritize on and how much time you are actually spending on a task. The Lite version is free and has limited features. The full version blocks apps that are distracting you and send more detailed reports to measure your productivity.
If you send emails to a list of subscribers, then Mailchimp is a must for you. It is free up to 12,000 emails per month to up to 2,000 subscribers. Mailchimp gives insight into how many people have opened the email, how many have clicked on the links you have sent them and which emails have bounced.
Another cool feature is that Mailchimp integrates with other apps like Google Analytics, Slack, Salesforce and more.
Everyone knows about LinkedIn but how to use it is more important. It is a social networking site for professionals. It is free with limited features. LinkedIn is essential to help you stay on top of the latest events in your field of work. It has a number of groups where people in similar careers discuss opportunities and challenges.
LinkedIn could just be the path towards improving your business or finding new avenues for your personal career growth. It is also a great tool to use while hiring people.
Expensify is an app that helps you track expenses, scan bills and more. It is a free app that is incredibly useful for a business owner trying to separate personal and business expenses. It also helps your employees to report expenses clearly. The expenses are exported into your accounting software making a seamless transition between different applications.
Expensify integrates with Salesforce, Quickbooks and a host of other software apps.
Insightly is a CRM software that helps small businesses take charge of the CRM. It has a mobile app and a web app that integrates with Google, Mailchimp and more. Insightly helps you stay on top of leads, partners, vendors and suppliers.
It also gives you reports and data on how your CRM based project is progressing: with data on your sales funnel and forecasts on the closing date for a deal. Insightly is not free but you can sign up for a free trial.
If you haven’t realized it already, Dropbox is a force to reckon with. You can share, collaborate and store files securely on the Cloud. It is easily accessible on any device. Dropbox helps in collaborating by notifying you on any changes made in documents and saving different versions of the document.
Dropbox Business is not free but offers unlimited storage space, ability to make groups and third party app integration, among other things.
Conclusion
Most of these apps facilitate teamwork and remove barriers like difficulty in communication, unclear task delegation and poor management of data. What it leaves you with is time to focus on bigger tasks that are more pressing for your business.
These recommendations are also free or with minimal initial investment. We hope they serve you well and we would love to hear about more apps that can improve efficiency in your business!
If you’re reading this article, I’m pretty sure you’re not hoping to find out what the next Candy Crush app is. If you are, we’ll have a different blog post for that soon!
For now though, I’m assuming that you are an entrepreneur on-the-go. Or a busy CEO juggling through multiple hats at work.
You can also be a high level executive who’s embracing tech and the convenience it brings.
The good news? PayrollHero rounds up a few of the best apps for busy CEOs this 2015. This is part 1, and we’ll feature more apps real soon.
Let’s dig in!
We’re not saying classic notebooks are useless at this day and age, but leaving home without one is more and more common these days.
But you know what you never forget when you leave home? Your mobile phone.
And this is where Evernote shines.
An app that you can use in the comfort of your own phone, Evernote takes note-taking to a whole new level.
Whether you need to jot down quick notes during a meeting, or you’re attending a conference and you’re trying to take note of key points, Evernote gets the job done perfectly.
You can literally take note of anything you want. Even writing a new campaign strategy, or projections for the coming quarter can be done with this productivity app.
Not only does it sport a user-friendly interface, it also syncs smoothly with your other devices. You can access Evernote in your laptop, PC, or tablet as well. So whatever progress you’ve made on your mobile phone, you can see it updated and syncing in real-time with your laptop.
Pretty fun stuff, huh?
Evernote is FREE, but if you like it so much and you want all your employees using it as well, you can consider their premium or business plan.
Now this is a personal favorite of mine (author). Imagine your browser’s bookmark tool… on STEROIDS.
That’s how Pocket functions! Any article or content you read from your favorite websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or even YouTube can easily be saved to your pocket.
It’s a bookmarking tool that saves any form of content (webpages, articles, videos, tweets, etc.) so that you can read it later, OFFLINE.
Anything you save to your Pocket, you can read later on even without internet.
The best part is that Pocket integrates with so many other apps you use such as Twitter, and even via Email.
Now, how awesome is that?
I’ve been using Pocket for almost a year now, and it’s one of the apps I can’t live without. It’s free, and syncs with all your devices. You can “pocket’ an article using your mobile phone, then finish reading it later on your laptop – or vice versa.
I’m having a hard time convincing people that I’m not being paid by Pocket to promote them, because I find myself tweeting about how awesome they are every once in awhile.
@nixeniego Thanks for the major shoutout, Nico!
— Pocket Support (@pocketsupport) November 4, 2015
Try it out and see for yourself.
HINT: Pocket this blog post for future reference. 😀
Need to rush to a business meeting? Or are you just too tired to drive back home after a long day at work? Well, thank your lucky stars for Uber.
One of the top apps in 2014, Uber has disrupted the transportation scene in the Philippines. For a very affordable price, you get to enjoy a comfortable ride, with your own private driver, to literally anywhere you want.
If you’ve been living in Manila for a while, you’ll know how difficult it is to hail a cab or get around the metro through public transportation vehicles. But with Uber, all you need is a few clicks on your mobile phone and your vehicle will be arriving in just a few minutes.
Driving to your preferred destination isn’t always an ideal choice, so Uber proves to be a convenient way to go anywhere you prefer.
The PayrollHero team loves Uber, and I personally use Uber at least 2-4 times a week.
With courteous drivers, affordable rates, and very friendly customer support, Uber is definitely one of the top apps for ANYONE, entrepreneur or not.
If for some reason you haven’t tried Uber yet, now’s the time. Go for it, and tweet us how your first ride goes.
Transitioning from Microsoft Word to Google Docs isn’t always easy, but it’s a jump I’m more than happy I made a few years ago.
With Google Docs, you can write any document and it auto-saves instantly. You literally never have to press “Save” again.
As you’re usually always on the go, it’s inevitable that you do forget to save your document from time to time. This won’t be an issue anymore with Google Docs.
What makes it awesome though is that it syncs with your entire Google account (Google Drive). So all you really need is a Gmail account, and you can use Google Docs (as well as Google Sheets), anytime.
Google Docs is free, in the cloud, and very easy to use. Give it a go today!
Of course you need to unwind somehow! Spotify is a great way to just relax and enjoy good music.
Spotify is FREE, although there’s a premium plan if you don’t want to be bothered with ads. You can also use the offline mode if you avail of the premium plan.
With Spotify, you get access to a boatload of music, from almost any genre you can think of. Unless you’re a Swifty, there’s no way for you not to enjoy Spotify.
Even busy entrepreneurs deserve some good music!
CONCLUSION
That rounds up our top apps for busy entrepreneurs list. I hope you make good use of some (if not all!) of the apps listed here. Become more productive, and more awesome with these must-download apps!
Keep checking our blog for more of these as we’ll come up with part two of the best apps for busy entrepreneurs in the coming weeks!
As you may have heard, Android phones have a new vulnerability – and it’s pretty bad. It has been covered on most major tech blogs and media outlets.
From NPR:
Android is the most popular mobile operating system on Earth: About 80 percent of smartphones run on it. And, according to mobile security experts at the firm Zimperium, there’s a gaping hole in the software — one that would let hackers break into someone’s phone and take over, just by knowing the phone’s number.
In this attack, the target would not need to goof up — open an attachment or download a file that’s corrupt. The malicious code would take over instantly, the moment you receive a text message…
Here’s how the attack would work: The bad guy creates a short video, hides the malware inside it and texts it to your number. As soon as it’s received by the phone, Drake says, “it does its initial processing, which triggers the vulnerability.”
Google has already issued a patch for this vulnerability.
BUT, most Android patches don’t make it to existing smartphone owners. They first have to be dealt with by the manufacturers of the phones (of which there are many) and then by telco themselves. Both of which don’t happen super fast – which results in million’s of Android devices being vulnerable to this issue.
At PayrollHero, we push Apple as our prefer platform for clients to use for clocking in and out. We support Android, but most of our new features come out for iOS first. Plus, there are so many added benefits that Apple brings, security being one of them, but other built in features like Guided Access.
Apple does not have this same problem as Android as Apple has controlled the relationship with the telcos and has the ability to push updates to iOS phones themselves. No need for the telco to get involved and Apple makes the hardware, so no manufacturers to deal with.
The PayrollHero #MyClock iOS app has been updated in the Apple app store. There are quite a few changes to the app, most noticeably is the design. The overall look has been updated as well as some new functionality.
The #MyClock iOS app is designed for individual employee use. The app shows an employee their upcoming and past schedules, their clock in and out data, the clock photos as well as lets them require a change to their schedule or notify of an absent.
Interested to know more about how PayrollHero works? Check out our website or reach out to our team and we would be pleased to give you a free one on one demo of the platform as well as the features and benefits.
Imagine a P1400 ($35USD) smartphone in the Philippines. Wouldn’t that be great? Well Mozilla is trying to make that happen. With their successful launch of a $33USD smartphone in India, Mozilla is looking at the Philippines to see if there is a market fit for their super low cost smartphone.
“At Mozilla, we’re a global community of technologists, thinkers and builders working together to keep the Internet alive and accessible, so people worldwide can be informed contributors and creators of the Web. We believe this act of human collaboration across an open platform is essential to individual growth and our collective future.”
I had the opportunity to have dinner last night with Gen Kanai, the Director of Asia Community Engagement for Mozilla and 500Startups Mentor to learn more about the phone and play with a developer version. It will be great to see them make this phone a reality in the Philippines.
Would you buy a 1400 PHP smartphone? Learn more
Google’s answer to the low cost smartphone is the Android One, which is cheaper than most smartphones listed at about $100USD.
