It’s often a good idea to create your own apps. The Berklee (sic) College of Music in Boston created an iPad app to manage audition data for 7,000 musicians worldwide. Instead of lugging heavy laptops, the faculty and staff now use their iPads to follow 300 domestic and 30 overseas
auditions. They organize schedules, view videos and bring in student ID numbers from the old database.

Filemaker Pro 12 is a $300 program from filemaker.com. There’s a free trial. A cheaper version called “Bento” sells for $49 version and is for Macs only. (Bento is Japanese for box.)

It turns out the first digit identifies the type of card issuer– airline, bank, etc. The first six digits tell you whether it’s Visa, Mastercard, and so on. The seventh and following digits are your account number.  A simple calculation can decide whether the card number is valid. The answer to the equation must be divisible by ten. Try and follow the graphic below.

"Cracking the Credit Card Code" from Mint.com

Outright.com is a free bookkeeping service.

What’s new: You can call in your expenses to keep track of them.

Outright tells you  what  you can deduct as a business expense,  when taxes are due, who needs a 1099, etc. One user says it used to take her four hours a week to record her sales and expenses in QuickBooks and then analyze the results. With Outright, she just clicks a tab and sees where she is monthly and yearly.

The service works with eBay, Freshbooks, Shoeboxed, PayPal and Expensify.

But the new “Online Banking Center” is hard to figure out. And tech support is as difficult to reach as ever. There’s a new online community to help you deal with problems, but Biafore says it’s not as good as the old message boards. What is good is her book, which provides the kind of information that should have come with the program. It’s $30 from oreilly.com.

–Bill4Time.com Hey you freelancers and anyone who charges customers by the hour. (We once heard about an attorney who charged clients if he thought about them while stuck in traffic.) This program tracks billable time and automatically bills hours for work done. It links with QuickBooks and other popular accounting programs. The latest version has more than 30 updates, most suggested by users. (You can go to ideas.bill4time.com to suggest your own.) It’s free if you have three clients or fewer. There are $20 and $40 version for bigger firms.

For 99 cents at the iPhone application store, you can get the “Personal Formulator,” which contains 30 formulas. Say you’re shopping. The Formulator can figure out how a purchase will increase your minimum monthly payments, or how much an item will cost after multiple discounts. The Personal Formulator can also convert miles to kilometers, meters to feet, etc. as well as figure out monthly car loans, insurance reimbursements, and so on. There are also business versions of the Formulator at the iPhone app store.

– There are 6.9 million Apple iPhones out there, and new things to do with it coming in every day. Griffin’s free “iTalk” can be used for podcasting on the go and for recording speeches and lectures to be played back later. The main reason it’s free is that it carries some advertising. This and a second free utility for broadcasting your iPhone material over a wi-fi network are both available at http://www.italksync.com/.

For postal mail, you need stamps, of course, and FreshBooks.com starts you out with two stamps already prepaid. You can buy more stamps using the same email procedure. They will seem much more expensive than simply buying stamps in person, but that’s because the price includes the invoice, a return envelope and handling.

FreshBooks has users in over 100 countries and they seem to be quite happy with it. The bills get sent out faster, and users report that they get paid faster as well, probably because the clients can pay online. Records are kept by the service and accessible at any time. If there is tax involved, that is added automatically.

The service is free if you have three or fewer active clients, or $14 a month for up to 25 clients. For $149 a month you can bill up to 5,000 clients this way.

You can do the same thing with “Google Docs” (Docs.Google.com), which lets workers collaborate on a Google version of a spreadsheet.  But people who are used to Microsoft’s Excel, by far the most popular spreadsheet, would likely not want to learn a new system. You can also collaborate with others using the spreadsheet contained in Microsoft Office Live , but in that case, each participant would have to downloadthe whole spreadsheet to his or her computer. The collaboration could not be in real time as any changes would have to be uploaded and then the spreadsheet downloaded again by others in the group.

The use of eXpresso online is free if there will be no more than five spreadsheets  at any one time. You need only go to the website, www.eXpressoCorp.com , and register to begin. All spreadsheets are kept behind firewalls and have other security measures to keep them from prying eyes. Templates are available online for quickly setting up spreadsheets for expense reports, mortgage amortization, etc.

A professional version costs $79 a year to subscribe and provides a plug-in utility that lets you use eXpresso offline. This is handy for creating graphs and adding Excel’s advanced features.  You, as the administrator, can set limits on what each participant may enter or do with any spreadsheet. You can assign some cells in a sheet to be available to only one person; this is only true of the professional version.

To create a new database, sign up on the web site, Blist.com, and click “new.” On the right-hand side of the screen you’ll see a list of possible subject headings. To have a “text” column, drag a text icon onto the blankspreadsheet type screen. Dragging the photo icon onto the work area creates a photo column, and so on. Columns can have any heading you want. You can even have a database within a database. In short, clicking on a subject that is actually a database, opens up the new database.

Blist has the look of a spreadsheet, with rows and columns for entering data. The intersection of a row and a column is a cell. But unlike a spreadsheet, the cells can contain just about any kind of information. And they contain an infinite amount of it. That’s right: infinite. (Though there’s a going to be a physical limit at some point just in storage.)

If you have a column of photos, these can be related to the names of companies, people or places. Let your mouse pointer hover over a name, and a thumbnail photo can appear as well, helping to jog your memory.

You can have columns for web sites and a column of stars. The stars can be used to rank those sites or rank the item in any list. Another column can hold documents. Another can hold links. You can have all related items automatically linked together so that when you call up a name, be it a person, company or subject, everything related to that name will come up in pages.

A set of “filters” let you search according to your own criteria. If you drag an icon for “ratings,” for example, onto Blist’s so-called selection canvas, and then click on “5 stars,” you’ll get a filtered list of only items that have received your five-star ratings. If you search for restaurants, only five-star restaurants will come up.

We have not seen anything this elegant in any other kind of program, except perhaps the new word processor, BuzzWord, that just came out from Adobe.