Mobile apps for a paperless budget

For all these years, we have known Budget sessions to be associated with thick piles of documents floating around in the parliament. But with our digitally savvy Prime Minister, things have certainly witnessed a change. It’s the time of e-files in government offices and no more piles of dog-eared files and clipped paper stacks littering office desks.

Himachal Pradesh is already set to become the country's first state to present a 'paperless' budget. Earlier, around 200 copies along with volumes of other documents used to be published during the budget session. 

Going paperless would help save money for taxpayers — and a few trees. Himachal Pradesh’s move towards going paperless is worth duplicating across states and governments.

Here are a few apps that can help go paperless this budget season:

Evernote

With an Evernote account, you can save all your notes tagged and collate them into one of your notebooks. It would help you give more than just an illusion of organisation. And with the option  of sharing notebooks on Evernote, the exchange of information becomes too easy. And its ubiquitous syncing to all your devices, helps you access your notes all of the time, meaning you can create notes and organise yourself on the move. Evernote is considered by many to be the best resource for thought storage and organization.

Scannable

Scannable is an app that makes mobile scanning dead simple. It represents a major leap forward in the attempts to move paper forward. Scannable captures the paper quickly and beautifully, transforming it into high-quality scans ready to save or share. Whether on the go or at the office, you can send paper on its way and move on. Scannable instantly recognizes business cards, receipts, and any other paper you point it at. Scans are automatically cropped and enhanced, producing crystal clear digital documents.

SwiftKey

SwiftKey is one of the best-selling Android keyboard apps of all time — and for a good reason. It uses a blend of artificial intelligence technologies that enable it to predict the next word the user intends to type.

And if you use multiple devices, you can use SwiftKey Cloud to sync everything SwiftKey has learned about your typing style along with all your custom dictionary data. With all the paperless work on our devices, you need something like SwiftKey to empower you with the right kind of productivity.

Opera Mini

Opera mini is all about being fast and efficient, and hence deserves a mention on the list. The browser packs in a fair amount of features, including a Smart Page for news and updates from your social networks, as well as saving pages for reading offline later. The discover features helps you with streamlined content from the most visited sites. It makes for a perfect app to execute all the research work involved.

Pocket

With pocket you can save all the important articles related to your research and save them directly into Evernote. Pocket syncs to your computer, device or tablet so you can read anything at any time, even without an Internet connection. So if you have to do voracious news-reading and social media-surfing to pull off that paperless budget, you can save it all with Pocket.