Local company helps businesses go paperless

ROCHESTER – Every business has a paper document, or series of forms, based on each of its needs. Annually, businesses spend billions of dollars on paper, plus the money for printing, postage, copying and storage.

The United States consumes nearly 30 percent of the world’s paper.

Rochester-based SnAPPii creates apps that ease a business's reliance on paper documents for invoicing, project management, and health and safety inspection. With an easy DIY app creation system, and an on-call service for premium accounts, SnAPPii is helping local businesses go paperless. And with the My PDF Form Manager, SnAPPii is able to directly upload existing PDF documents to Apple and Android products without losing valuable information.

“There’s not a business on the planet that doesn’t have a form, and we noticed that the bulk of the time we spent was actually recreating forms they already have,” SnAPPii owner Alex Bakman said. “I kind of looked at that and said, ‘Well, why can’t we use their existing forms?’ If we could do that, then we could go from zero to 60 in three seconds.”

The My PDF Form Manager, which SnAPPii developed over a year and released in March, is available for $5 per month.

Additionally, the management app gives businesses the capability to add new fields to forms. These fields can range anywhere from a barcode scanner to photo taking capabilities. Though other companies, like Device Magic and Flowfinity, have successfully created mobile form apps, none offer the ability to implement new fields into a document.

“This kind of app couldn’t have existed five years ago,” Bakman said. “We are working with brand new technology.”  

Digitizing forms, and making them easily accessible on smartphones and tablets, provides business owners and employees easy access to important documents, while also reducing costs.

SnAPPii has also taken a unique approach to fully customizable app creation, providing businesses with do-it-yourself and custom build options. Bakman estimates that the do-it-yourself approach takes about a week’s time to master, but does not require any technical experience. Slightly less time intensive, the custom build option only requires businesses to send in requests for desired features and layouts with SnAPPii handling the heavy lifting. Whatever option is chosen, SnAPPii can turn out apps 30 times faster than larger off-shore competitors thanks to their codeless design.

To date, SnAPPii has created more than 26,000 apps for 26 industries and 80-plus ready-made free business apps. All of SnAPPii’s apps are supported in 17 different languages.    

SnAPPii’s My PDF Form Manager app wouldn’t mark the first time the company has created something new and innovative. In the past, SnAPPii built a Public Safety Provider app for college campuses which can immediately contact the police in an emergency situation, a Starbucks location finder that determines the nearest cafe and provides a menu, and a Construction Manager app that calculates measurements and makes estimates of construction projects.

SnAPPii’s efforts at reducing paper consumption have led to a working relationship with the Green Alliance, a Portsmouth-based organization that strives to connect eco-friendly businesses with consumers throughout the Seacoast. As part of that partnership, Green Alliance members will be able to purchase the My PDF Form Manager app at the reduced price of $2.50 per user per month.

All of SnAPPii’s apps are available through the Apple Store and the Google Play store. For more information, visit www.snappii.com. For more about the Green Alliance, visit www.greenalliance.biz.

Mike Bizier writes for the Green Alliance.