Outfitting a company to get off the ground

When you’re starting a company, speed and efficiency are priorities. Luckily, there are plenty of apps for your smartphone or tablet that can help people collaborate and make quicker decisions.

Slack is quickly becoming the go-to app for team communications. The app is essentially a chat room that allows real-time messaging between team members. You can start different chat rooms and name them.

A chat can be for a group of people, or you can have private, one-on-one discussions. You can also share images, videos and files that are pertinent to your business as well as plain text messages.

Slack integrates with external services like Dropbox and Twitter, and its search function is excellent so it’s easy to find details of a previous discussion without combing through lots of text.

The app’s interface looks great and it feels like a lot of time has been spent making it easy to use. Best of all, Slack is free for an unlimited number of users and an unlimited amount of time and the app is available on iOS and Android.

When you need to move beyond discussing a business plan and start enacting it, the Trello app is a fabulous option. Trello is a described by its makers as a “whiteboard with superpowers” and this is a great description of how it feels to use it.

Think of it like a digital planning tool: You can keep notes, create to-do lists and checklists, and so on. Boards can be populated with text, images and other items, and you can even create notifications and alerts so you can make a plan and act on it. As with Slack, the information you create inside Trello is synchronized through the cloud so team members can collaborate through their own devices.

Trello is powerful, and easy to use. But the app does have a learning curve, so you’ll need to allocate some time to teaching your team to use its whiteboards, information “cards” and so on. It’s free on both iOS (including an Apple Watch extension) and Android.

Keeping on top of your expenses is time-consuming, but the Expensify app, which is free for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, can streamline the process. It allows you to scan a sales receipt, identify the text and figures and create an expense filing without lots of typing.

Expensify can also track time spent working and the number of miles driven, including automatically tracking distances using your phone’s GPS. It has timed alerts for itineraries - and to make overseas trips simpler it also has automatic currency conversion.

If you need a logo design for your company, you can create one quickly with the LogoScopic app. The app has more than 850 logo designs that are separated into categories like Pro, Art and Lifestyle. When you’ve found one you like, you can edit characteristics like size and color and add text in about 100 fonts.

Finally, the startup life can be stressful, so there are apps like Headspace to help settle your mind. It includes guided meditation sessions and it’s free on iOS and Android.