I use a lot of online products and services in my daily life, many of which I now rely on. I thought I'd take a minute to highlight a few of my favorites.
YouMail
YouMail is my voicemail provider, and happens to be located right down the freeway from me. Even though I have an iPhone and could choose to use Visual Voicemail, YouMail is so much better. Not only does it transcribe my voicemail and send a text message letting me know, but it can also transcribe messages and email me the transcriptions or even the MP3 of the voicemail itself.
Youmail also has plenty of other useful features like personalized recordings for different people and you can even greet callers by the name recognized on caller ID.
The weakest part of YouMail is their web interface. It kind of looks like it was made in 2001 (hint hint: we should talk!). But the service is great and an outdated-looking interface isn't going to keep me from the great service they provide.
Outright
Outright is service for small business owners that takes the hassle out of bookkeeping and figuring out taxes. It handles the collection of tax forms from contractors automatically and does all the expected stuff like connecting to bank accounts for easy record-keeping.
Shoeboxed
Shoeboxed is, without a doubt, the easiest way to manage receipts. They give you an email address that you can send digital receipts to. Their system automatically parses what you send them and figured out the total, payee, and category the receipt belongs in. You can also scan paper receipts into the system.
On top of that, they also have a mail-in service that lets customers send in receipts and lets them deal with the hassle of scanning. I plan on sending my first batch of gas receipts (among others) to them today. It also plays nicely with many accounting programs, including Outright.
Dropbox
I doubt the need to even mention Dropbox. Everybody I know uses them. I've written about them previously here. Dropbox is a service that backs up and syncs files on your computer between your other computers. When I save a file on one computer, Dropbox instantly backs up the file online and syncs the updates with my other computers. Wherever I go, I always have the latest versions of whatever I'm working on. Dropbox is one of the most important things to happen to computing in the last decade.
