Owning a small business has many rewarding benefits. You control the decision making, personally connect with clients, and feel a special sense of personal success when you live out your entrepreneurial dreams.

However, with a smaller network of support, comes great responsibility. Not only will you have to dedicate more time to ensuring the success of your business, you may also have to undertake new disciplines such as bookkeeping or project management. Additionally, starting and maintaining your own business can be extremely costly.

Yet fear not entrepreneurs, because we’ve found these 4 small business mobile apps to ensure you are effectively communicating, organizing, and staying informed about your business on a lean budget no matter what stage of business you are in:

• Communication:
  • Fuze – Fuze is a multi-party video conferencing app that allows you to efficiently connect, collaborate, and communicate with up to 25 employees or clients from your smartphone or tablet. In addition to video conferencing, Fuze provides you with 1 GB of cloud storage and allows you to share content including PDFs, PowerPoints and Word documents. You can also share high-resolution videos and photos from your mobile library. Another benefit of using Fuze to organize and manage your business’s conferences is that you can record your sessions. This enables you to review any information shared during the meeting at a later time, effectively backing up your note-taking too.

• Travel:
  • TriptIt – Planning a successful business trip can be exhausting, with connecting flights, renting vehicles, and reaching destinations on time. That’s where TripIt comes in. TripIt creates a digital itinerary by simply forwarding your travel confirmation emails for flights, hotel, rental car, and even restaurant reservations to plans@tripit.com. If you encounter a change in plans – which happens often during travel – you can edit your itinerary through the app at any time. TripIt also includes information regarding directions, maps, and weather conditions of your planned destination. You can sync your itinerary with Apple Calendar, Outlook, or Google Calendar. Finally, you can keep employees or clients in the loop by sharing your TripIt itinerary via email or social media.

• Time Management:
  •  OmniFocus: OmniFocus allows you to manage and schedule tasks to ensure you make the most of your precious time. You can use the Inbox feature as a place to write down all the tasks you wish to complete and then compile these tasks into project lists. These lists can be organized by date, person, or location and sorted in to related folders. For instance, you can organize tasks into folders for individual clients to break down actions into smaller and more manageable pieces. Another awesome feature of OmniFocus is that you can set a Context to each action or task. For example, if you create a task about having a meeting with a client, you can make notes about particular topics that you want to cover or a question you want to ask during the meeting. The home screen of OmniFocus generates a weekly Forecast of upcoming goals in order to review weekly tasks and incorporate more tasks into your schedule as needed. To make sure you’re on track, you can set personalized notifications to remind you of approaching deadlines. OmniFocus works across your iOS apps so you can enter information using Siri and sync your tasks with your Apple Calendar.

• Finance:
  • inDinero – inDinero is an amazing resource to track your business’s daily expenses and cash flow. You can sync your business’s bank and credit accounts with inDinero’s dashboard to review financial activity all in one place. You can also receive real-time alerts to keep you up to date on any account activity. In addition to easy account viewing, you can record and organize business expenses by uploading photos of receipts. This information can then be labeled, organized, and reviewed for expense reports. inDinero also provides you with an instantly updated monthly overview of your business’s cash flow including revenues, expenses and total budget. This feature is perfect for analyzing, planning, and improving future financial decisions.

Running a small business may take more time and risks, but the payoff can easily outweigh the challenges. With dedication and tools like these small business mobile apps, you can ensure an invigorating and fulfilling career.