5 of the Best Productivity Apps for CFOs

One word: Automation. We don’t mean replacing your staff with robots, but automation apps can reduce a lot of those vampire-ish tasks that drain time from your day.

Here are five of our favourites that will wrestle back your day from unnecessary or unproductive tasks:

Top Productivity Apps for CFOs #1: PlayBooks

Yeah, yeah, call us biased. But in case you don’t already know, PlayBooks is a game-changer for the time consuming world of work meetings. PlayBooks pumps your meetings with expert knowledge and serves it up in actionable tasks that you can use to improve your business. Productivity gains out the wazoo. Try it for free now, if you don’t believe us.  

Top Productivity Apps for CFOs #2: Zapier‍

If you feel like you’re already using too many tools to work and running them all is eating up time, you need to meet Zapier. This workflow automation tool moves info between more than 2,000 web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work. Integrate everything from your accounting software to CRM tools and even online communication tools. It’s easy and we love it (we’re even adding integrations with PlayBook soon, so watch this space!).

Top Productivity Apps for CFOs #3: Calendly

How many emails or IM’s do you have to send before you organise one meeting? In a time where no one even picks up the phone any more without an appointment, Calendly helps you schedule meetings instantly by uploading your availability and letting people book a timeslot that suits. It even integrates with PlayBooks for organising your smarter, agenda-powered meetings.

Top Productivity Apps for CFOs #4: Office 365

Collaboration is a productivity godsend, especially for CFOs and finance teams working in Excel spreadsheets all the time. You’re forever waiting for each of your team members to update their sections before you can review and the back-and-forth file sharing is enough to send you insane.

Use the co-authoring functionality in Excel 365 to work in the cloud and feedback collaboratively on a single document. This will keep live documents running online without ever making it to version 2, let alone 47. And yes, an integration with Office 365 and PlayBooks is coming soon — how did you guess?

PRO TIP: If you don’t have a 365 subscription, saving files in Dropbox will also do the trick, or Google Workspace users can work collaboratively on similar tools such as Google Sheets.

Top Productivity Apps for CFOs #5: Expense Apps (Expensify, Concur, or Certify)

Expense reporting is one task that eats up a lot of your team’s time. Probably yours too, if you’re prone to sending out stern company-wide emails reminding everyone to submit their receipts. Thankfully there are a heap of very user-friendly automation tools out there that are so good, your staff will actually use them, such as Expensify, Concur, or Certify.

Get infinitely more productive with PlayBooks

PlayBooks is the only meetings app with a built-in productivity hack for CFOs: all the knowledge you need for your meeting.

Don’t take our word for it. Give PlayBooks a test run and see how efficient and productive your next meeting could be. Join PlayBooks today for a free trial.