With the arrival of spring and longer, warmer days, the last thing a busy Solo PR Pro wants to do is spend more time indoors making sense of receipts, expenses, and other data in preparation for filing taxes. Download these apps now to make your day-to-day business life a little easier. Just think, by this time next year the annual struggle won’t be so bad at all.

Bookkeeping

QuickBooks, Freshbooks, Gusto, Xero, Zoho – most every bookkeeping program now has an app allowing you to keep up with categorizing and posting your financial transactions, ensuring clean, efficient reporting at year-end.

Shoeboxed

If scanning receipts is more your style, try Shoeboxed. This service takes “the most important data points on your receipts and automatically categorize them by vendor, total spent, date, and payment type” providing audit-friendly expense reports. Expensify also offers a similar service.

MileIQ

MileIQ tracks your drives in real time. Categorizing each drive happens with a swipe right for business, left for personal. Mile IQ provides subcategories such as medical, commute, meeting, customer visit, and more, and allows you to send yourself reports via email.

TripIt

TripIt is a mileage app-plus, with the added benefit of organizing your travel itineraries.

TaxFyle

Most business owners prefer to establish an ongoing business relationship with an accountant but if on-demand tax filing is your style, try TaxFyle. Upload your documents to this service and get connected to a tax professional.

IRS2Go

Even the IRS is in the app business. The IRS2Go app allows you to check the status of your account, make payments, and more.

BONUS – Calm

After you’ve prepared your information for tax filing, you’ll need to decompress. Try a mindfulness app like Calm.

These apps are sure to make your life easier and next year’s tax preparation a little less painful. Keep in mind that most of these apps come with nominal fees, but they do add up. Find the fit that’s best for you.

Do you have a favorite business app that we haven’t covered here? Tell us about it in the comments or on social media using #solopr.

This post was written by Michelle Kane, Solo PR Pro Premium Member and Head Honcho of Voice Matters, LLC . Michelle has over 20 years' experience in communications management, writing, public relations, administration and broadcasting.

Photo by William Iven on Unsplash