With so many APPs on the menu, it’s hard to choose the ones that will work best for you. At the recent ERA Real Estate All-Star Agent Retreat in Marco Island, Fla., speaker Shannon King served up APPs she has tested and loved during her presentation – Technology APPetizers: Food for Thought.  Here are a few treats to try for both Realtors and small business owners.

  1. Dragon Dictation: Brought to you by Nuance Communications, Dragon allows you to instantly create test and e-mail messages simply by talking. It is up to 5 times faster than typing on a keyboard, saving you time when communicating with clients.
  2. Milog 1.5: Tired of tracking your mileage for the sake of your expense reports or providing home to office distance to you clients? Milog 1.5 turns this menial task into a breath of fresh air by using GPS to track mileage and providing calculations of your mileage write-offs to help you record expenses for tax write-offs, manage your expense reports and keep track of daily drive-time, helpful in tweaking time management. It tells you what you spent so you can begin working it into your budget.
  3. Fresh Books: Working from a cloud, this APP makes your files available from any device, calculates your activity and time per hour. And to easily log your time spent, simply push the start and stop button. This give you an idea of how much time you have spent on each client, so you can later market that to them and to potential clients to promote your one-on-one service dedication.
  4. Shoeboxed.com: Tired of expense report and tax reporting labor and crunch times? This handy app takes the tedium out of tax time preparation. Just drop your receipts into the online dropbox and Shoeboxed will scan and data enter your receipts and put it into an excel format along with what the expense is related to so that your expenses are organized and ready to go to your CPA. Tax stress? What tax stress!
  5.  Cardmunch.com: Do you have piles of unorganized business cards? Organize your contacts by using Cardmunch to snap of picture of a business card and have it automatically uploaded into your contacts. Talk about relationship management at its best.

More of Shannon’s favorites will be featured in future posts. In the meantime, if you have other productive APPs you’d like to share, please do so in the comments section below. And once you try the APPS above, give us a shout to let us know what you think.