Wanderlust: Expat Life & Style in Thailand June / July 2017: The Business Issue | Page 27

Business
TOGGL
Free
If you’re a freelancer or if you bill by the hour, it’s im-
portant that you know how your hours are spent. With
Toggl, you can track every minute of your day, across as
many projects or clients as necessary. The app allows
you to export all of your information into graphs and
time sheets, so that you’re completely prepared should
your client ever ask for evidence of your clocked hours.
Have a team of employees? No problem. Toggl is
free for up to five users, though a Pro version at $5 per
month per user is available with unlimited accounts
and extra functionality. Keeping track of your staff and
projects has never been easier.
WAVE
Free
Though it’s not the most exciting part of run-
ning a business, accounting is amongst the
most important. Keep your books in order and
your costs low with Wave, an accounting soft-
ware platform specially designed for business-
es with fewer than 10 employees to help man-
age finances all in one place. Wave can keep
you on top of invoicing, customer payments,
expense tracking, receipt scanning, and report
generation.
The app is free but added features, such as
next-level customer support and payroll facili-
ties, start at $19 a month — a bargain com-
pared to the cost of hiring an outside firm or
new employee to crunch your numbers.
SQUARE
Pay a percentage of sales
With Square, any business own-
er with a smartphone or tablet can
easily take credit card payments —
a real perk for burgeoning com-
panies that depend on point-of-
sale purchases. Simply plug in the
card-reader to your device and
swipe away. Receipts can be sent
via email or SMS, and the app works
offline too. Sound too good to be
true? It gets better. There’s no sign-
up or monthly fees with Square.
Instead, you will pay 2.75 percent of
each transaction (or 3.5 percent, if
entering the payment information
manually).
This nifty software was co-devel-
oped by the brains behind Twitter
and is currently used by thousands
of merchants around the world
looking for a simpler way of accept-
ing payments.
TRIPIT
Free
If your new business means being on the road or in the air, having a
personal PA to organize your itinerary and tell you where you need
to be and when would be a lifesaver. TripIt does essentially that,
consolidating your travel plans into a single itinerary that’s accessi-
ble at any time and on any device.
Once you have all the details of your trip, send each flight or ho-
tel confirmation email to TripIt; they’ll put your plans into one help-
ful platform and transform them into a master itinerary for every
trip. The app also gives you weather updates, maps, and directions
to where you need to be.
Don’t worry if you’re offline, either. Your account can be accessed
even without an internet connection. Though the app is free, TripIt
Pro costs $49 per year and TripIt for Teams costs $29 per month for
up to 10 users.
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