Owning a small business no longer means being chained to the office for hours on end. With more streamlined business models and the proliferation of mobile devices, many entrepreneurs are able to run their companies while not missing out on their personal lives by utilizing some of the great apps for business owners. The following small business apps are designed to help entrepreneurs increase productivity, automate operations, and ultimately free up time and money.

Venmo

Venmo is a very powerful app developed to allow transactions to be made on a peer-to-peer basis. When you or your sales force are meeting with clients, you no longer have to wait for a month or more in order to receive money for the products and services you deliver. The Venmo business app offers bank grade security, and allows you to complete transactions and move money to your bank account in one business day. As far as apps for small businesses go, Venmo is one of the most powerful, and is available for both iOS and Android devices.

Flowdock

Flowdock is a business app designed to allow for team collaboration, so that your employees can work on projects no matter where they are. Flowdock incorporates email, instant messaging, document and file sharing, and much more in order to streamline project management, and taking schedule conflicts out of the equation. Flowdock offers full integration with nearly 100 business and social tools, and extremely competitive pricing in order to tailor the app to your company’s needs.

Refresh

As a business owner, you are interviewing people for jobs, as well as meeting with clients and customers. It would be great if you could get some kind of reading on who they are, what they are like, and what others have to say about them. Refresh crawls through search engines and social networks to give you important information about the people you are meeting – like who they have worked with in the past, what customers have to say about them, or if they seem like a good fit for your company. Refresh understands that it is better to have information ahead of time, rather than be surprised further down the road, and their small business app will give you the extra edge you need when dealing with people.

Box

As simple to use and secure as the name implies, Box offers the ability to modify and share documents with staff and clients across multiple devices and platforms. Subscription-based and very affordable, Box is one of the top-rated small business apps for monitoring projects and managing document development to completion.

Wunderlist

You are a business owner, and the brains of the entire operation. Brilliant ideas come to you left and right, yet there’s never a napkin or (working) pen within reach. This is where Wunderlist comes in. Wunderlist is a business app that allows you to record your innovative ideas, or task reminders right on your mobile devices without having to wait (and possibly forget in the process) until you are sitting at your desk. Business owners use Wunderlist for everything from simple reminders on up to new product ideas. Wunderlist is available for iOS as well as a Chrome plug-in.