An office manager is not at a desk for most of the day, which is the whole argument for office management apps and also the reason they disappoint. A phone is excellent at a small number of things and poor at the rest, and the products that succeed on one are the ones that admitted this and built for the small number. This page is about that division: the jobs genuinely worth doing on a phone because they happen while you are walking around the building, the jobs that are worse on a phone than they were on paper, and the two questions about devices that decide whether any of it survives contact with a real office.
What belongs on a phone
Four things, all of which share a shape: they happen away from the desk and take under a minute. Looking something up, which supplier services the copier and when they were last here. Recording something you are standing in front of, the serial number of the laptop being handed over, the meter reading, the thing that has broken. Approving something small that is blocking somebody else. And ticking off a task on a list you are working through, which on a move day is most of the day. Each of those is genuinely better on a phone than written on a hand and typed up later, because the retyping is where the accuracy goes.
What is worse on a phone, and should not be attempted
Anything involving more than one record at a time: bulk edits, reconciliation, comparison. Anything requiring a document to be read carefully, because a contract read on a phone is a contract skimmed. And anything with a long form, because the abandonment happens halfway and leaves a half made record that is worse than none. A good app in this category makes those cases obvious rather than possible, and sends you to a laptop. A bad one reproduces the whole desktop on four inches and calls it parity.
The two device questions that decide it
First, whose phone is it? If the app is on personal phones, the data on it is your company's on a device you do not control, and you need to know what happens when someone leaves: whether access can be revoked centrally, and whether anything is stored on the phone itself. Second, what happens with no signal? Plant rooms, basements and lift lobbies are exactly where equipment records get updated and exactly where the signal is worst. An app that loses what was typed on a dead connection will be abandoned within a month, and rightly.
Questions people ask about office management apps
Do we need a native app or is a website enough?
For the four jobs above, a website that works properly on a phone is usually enough and has one large advantage: nothing to install, nothing to update, and access ends when the account does. The case for a native app is offline capture and the camera. If neither of those matters to you, the browser is the simpler answer.
What about staff who are not office managers?
Be careful here. The moment an app is for everyone it becomes a directory, a booking tool and a noticeboard, which is a different product with a different budget. Keep the office administration app for the people who administer the office, and let the wider company keep using whatever it already reads.
Does Fitouto have an app?
The workspace runs in the browser and works on a phone for the lookups and the tick offs, which are the jobs worth doing there. There is no separate native app to install and no phone only feature, so nothing is stored on the device and access ends with the account.