Firm Management
Apps We Love April 2019 – Shipping & Mailing
Apr. 18, 2019
Do you ship packages? Do you struggle with verifying zip codes? Do you need tracking information? Do you fret over delivery delays or lack of real people to answer questions? We’ve surveyed the CPA Practice Advisor community as well as various shipping options on the internet and have found some tools that you might find useful.
If you send or receive a lot of packages, you might want to invest in Deliveries ($4.99), an app that combines information from all of your deliveries into one place where you can monitor status and get real-time updates. In addition to tracking all shipments in progress, Deliveries saves a history of previous shipments, shows your in-progress shipments on a map, and allows you to share the information with others. Randy Johnston, CEO and founder of Network Management Group, Inc. recommends Deliveries, as well as My Package and Parcel Tracker.
My Package allows you to enter or scan package tracking information and then it follows your package through to delivery. A free version includes advertising and limits tracking to 30 items per month. A Pro version is available for $1.99 which is ad-free and removes the quantity limitation.
Parcel Tracker (also called ParcelTrack) offers both a free and fee-based ($2.99) version, and it offers the map tracking and multiple package tracking that the other apps include. The fee-based version includes cross-platform sync, push notifications, and a bar-code scanner.
Samantha Mansfield, director of professional development and community at CPA.com, relies on the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) app. “I’ve used it many times to look up a zip code and verify an address before shipping.”
Caleb Jenkins, EA, CQP, leader of client accounting services at RLJ Financial Services, said, “I like Package Buddy because it allows me to see when my packages from all the main carriers are expected to arrive. It is also helpful to share the details with another individual in my family, so they know when to expect something.
Arrive Package Tracker is the tracker of choice for Sandra Wiley, president of Boomer Consulting. “It tracks all of the packages coming to me, or going to my clients in one place and I don’t have to go to lots of different sites. Also, the notifications on my phone are terrific.”
Stacy Kildal, owner of Kildal Services, recommends Stamps.com. “I don’t ship anything, but I use Stamps.com for postage; I’ve had that account for close to 20 years.”
Roman Kepczyk, director of firm technology strategy at Right Networks, told us, “We’ve been using USPS.com’s Click-N-Ship for the past five years to create and print labels to send out copies of our Quantum of Paperless Guide which only takes a couple of minutes to do, and it is super easy to create multiple labels on our account. We also regularly use their Hold Mail feature when I’m going to be on any trips more than a few days.”