4 Great iPhone Apps for Business Travel

I have been doing some more traveling for business recently, both contracting for another company as well as for my own business. In addition to my other favorite iPhone apps, I find these apps particularly useful for business travel:

Expensify

One of the great things about business travel is that someone else pays for it. One of the hassles of business travel is that they don’t just throw you a bag of gold but instead expect detailed expense reports including receipts.

I just switched to the new Expensify app and the expensify.com website and I love them. I can scan receipts easily into my account and then create an expense for each receipt and attach it to one of a number of expense reports. My last trip was a combination of work for TripAdvisor and for my own business and it was helpful to have two different expense reports open at the same time. I was even able to split a check for dinner between the two reports. I can either have the receipts manually transcribed for a small fee ($.30) or fill in the information myself for free.

Full Contact
I love getting your business card after we have talked but just having that card in a pile some place does not actually help my business. I use Full Contact (previously Card Reader) to scan in my cards and its website fullcontact.com to then allow me to tag and organize those cards. You can use FullContact for free but after the first ten cards you may choose, as I did, to pay to have a premium account that will allow you to scan more cards per month. Like Expensify the transcription of cards is done by a human and they usually do a great job. As I mentioned previously, I had been using CardMunch by LinkedIn to scan in cards. It was a great service until I started getting hundreds of cards and then the app just stopped working. By contrast, my FullContact database now has thousands of contacts.

Things
Part of the whole business thing is getting things done. Even when I am on the road the need to get things done does not go away. Since I am currently working 3 jobs just the task of remembering what needs to get done for whom by when is a challenge. I use the Things program on my Mac and on my iPhone to keep track of my todo lists, projects, etc. I can have multiple projects and multiple tasks for every project. I can also schedule periodic tasks like post a Daily Photo or even a periodic project like the weekly Amateur Traveler podcast. This project has at least a dozen different steps that I need to accomplish each week.

When I am driving I often add to my todo list using Siri. I just tell Siri to “Remember to reschedule dentist appointment” and that task can show up in my inbox on Things automatically.

LinkedIn Contacts
Since I switched from CardMunch to Card Reader the LinkedIn Contacts app has become less central to how I manage my contacts but it is still great to have an optimized app in my pocket to access my various business contacts that I keep track of via LinkedIn.