Insurance software, industry glossary and terms, solutions, technology and risk systems.

The broking game is definitely less fun than it used to be eh?

Lower premium leads to more customers, more customers leads to less time and less time leads to you running around like a headless chicken. I’d imagine you’re spending no time with your friends and family and probably working yourself into an early grave where you will forever be haunted by the image of insurance software burnt into your retina. Well Riskheads are here to try and ease at least some of the pressure with the top 8 apps, not just for business people, but that serve specific purpose for brokers. Better yet, they can buy you those precious moments to maybe go crazy and take a short lunch break!

1. GENIUS SCAN Free

Ever been out on the road being chased mercilessly by an insurer for a proposal form? Save yourself an unnecessary headache and download Genius Scan to scan the document into your mobile device and forward it straight onto your underwriter.  Not only does it have smart page detection, but it will also correct perspective and post-process the image automatically once scanned – for the less geeky this means it’ll make it look prettier.

2. LINKEDIN Free

As with everything, insurance is a people business and the best customers tend to come from networking and recommendations. LinkedIn has increasingly become the tool for networking with fellow business professionals and now has over 225 million users worldwide, including 77m in the US and 11m in the UK. Functionality continues to improve and you can now use it as a tool for anything from staff recruitment to client prospecting.  Just make sure you take time to understand the privacy settings and aren’t sharing your entire client list with competing brokers!

 3. DRAGON DICTATION Free

Nobody likes typing up their meeting notes after visiting a client, so dictate them into your phone with Dragon Dictation when you get back to the office and let your no doubt excessively expensive handset put it’s dual core processors to good use. Said to be up to five times faster than typing, this free tool can aid busy account executives in ridding themselves of mundane administrative tasks so they can get on with the proper jobs that actually make a difference to their end of year results and target such as ‘networking’ at the local drinking establishment.

4. EXPENSIFY Free

If like me, your wallet or purse becomes an increasingly bulkier mess of receipts as the month goes on, you can sign up to Expensify for free and scan you receipts into your phone, format them in a report and send them straight on to your boss all in a few button presses. This nifty tool will also allow you to capture mileage and even has a multi-lingual ‘smart scan’ for receipts that enables you to avoid the monthly trauma of submitting expenses the old fashioned way and can even be completed on the move. Just got back from a client meeting? Pop the mileage in your phone there and then and don’t worry about rushing it at the end of the month. The fabled ‘paperless office’ is getting closer by the day and even their tagline points to “Expense reports that don’t suck”.

5. GOTOMEETING £29p/m

Coffee breath… M25 traffic… stuffy meeting rooms… eliminate all of these problems by using GoToMeeting to conduct online conference calls instead.  You can save hours commuting to visit clients across the country to buy yourself more time to instead focus on the things that are important to them. Accessible via your smart phone you can share webcams, documents and your even computer screen with the meeting participants meaning that Death by Powerpoint ™ can now even be achieved from the other side of the world. Just hope they don’t integrate smell-o-vision anytime soon.

6. BUSINESS CARD READER PRO £4.99

Don’t be the plonker carrying around a massive leather bound file-o-fax full of all your contact’s business cards; it’s not the 80’s and you’re definitely not Del Boy. Instead, scan them with your Smart Phone with this handy piece of software that automatically recognises the details on the card and files them in your contacts accordingly. Perhaps the icing on the cake is the out-of-the box integration with Linkedin, Salesforce and Evernote. It’s so good that it was even featured in the iPhone TV adverts.

 7. QUICKOFFICE PRO HD £13.99

One of the biggest problems with Apple products is that they’re not exactly best buddies with Microsoft. That means that despite the majority of the broking world dealing in Word, Powerpoint and Excel, iPhone/iPad users are unable to open these files, losing valuable time having to wait to get back to a PC. Well struggle no more; Quickoffice Pro HD is the answer to your prayers and allows full editing of all Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets and presentations and also allows you to save to PDF, print via AirPrint or access files in the Cloud. In short, problem solved.

8. BOX Free

Steve Jobs once said that “You may not store much before too long” and he was absolutely right, with more and more files being shared over the internet than ever. Even computer games saves and music is being stored in the Cloud these days so why should your work be any different? Box.net supplies such a platform with simple, secure file sharing from anywhere and market leading online security and encryption keeping your data safe. Skydrive alone currently holds 10 petabytes (around 10.5 million gigabytes) online across 17 million customers, so the Cloud revolution is definitely underway. Plus, why waste your hard disk on broking notes when it can be used for humorous videos of cat’s sneezing and the like?!

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