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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. One of the keys to small business success is managing money. Whether it’s cash flow, credit or expenses, having money when you need it keeps the business going. More importantly, it can enable owners to make the investments necessary to grow their businesses. With today’s smartphone technology, it’s easier than ever to keep track of financial indicators. Here are 21 iPhone apps — all free — to help you stay informed and monitor your finances. Let us know which you use in the comments below. Name your bank, and they probably have an app. Most offer similar features, however a couple have some different options that, depending on your situation, could be valuable. Bank of America, Wells Fargo Mobile and PNC Mobile Banking have mobile banking apps that allow you to check your account balance, pay bills, transfer funds and find banking locations. Citibank also has a mobile banking app called Citi Mobile. Citi’s app also enables users to check account balances, pay bills and transfer funds. In addition, credit card customers can pay their credit card bill, check balances, view recent transactions and track their rewards. Both TD Bank and BB&T offer similar banking services as well as promote the ability to contact their customer service departments directly via the app. SunTrust Mobile Banking gives users access to up-to-date account balances for their checking, savings and money market accounts. I couldn’t determine if they had a list of banking locations within the app. ING Direct’s mobile app has the unique feature of person-to-person payments. Chase Mobile also provides the person-to-person QuickPay option. And, the app allows iPhone users to make a deposit via cellphone. If you make a lot of purchases with a credit card, a couple of credit card companies have apps to help manage your account. American Express provides card members the ability to pay their bill, check balances, view recent transactions, manage multiple cards and check reward points. Discover Mobile offers similar credit card services such as making payments, and viewing recent transactions and rewards activity. In addition, the app provides detailed account information including current balance, minimum payment due, credit available and Cashback Bonus balance. If part of your financial planning includes investments, several firms offer apps to monitor your account. Fidelity Read More

The wait for an official CNN app on your iPhone is over, and it looks like it was worth your patience. Available on the iTunes store -- Download here -- CNN's new app represents a serious investment in mobile news delivery, a 55 million user market according to Neilsen, and adds a few game changing features which may leave rivals MSNBC and Fox News scrambling to catch up. I spoke with CNN's Louis Gump, VP, Mobile today by phone. CNN's iPhone app takes advantage of 3.0 SDK features and is an attempt to "reinvent news applications on the iPhone". Integrating a huge library of video clips -- as well a live stream during breaking news -- directly into the app, the focus is obvious, taking CNN's global news brand and putting it just that much closer to your fingertips. The most compelling feature, from by brieding and screen shots -- I wasn't allowed early access to the app itself -- is what Gump called, "Coverflow for news." A feature which lets users swipe through pictures and bullet points, looking for points of interest in the days popular headlines. Positioned as a premium app, you'll have to fork over $1.99 for the goods, and tolerate just a wee bit of advertising mixed with your content. From what was relayed to me -- and I pressed -- none of the advertising sounds particularly intrusive, with a total lack of preroll video advertising, and sponsor adds appearing inline with, but visually separated from, the textual content. Also on tap, breaking news alerts for interests you've defined, the ability to store news for later (airplane mode) and of course, social sharing on Facebook, Twitter and via email. And, when you get sick of reading the news, you can make the news -- via iReport -- with mobile uploads of video and images. "People in the field really do have access to the most compelling content, whether that be photo or video", which will be vetted as the current web version of iReport is, both by user filtering and "a small percentage" by human editors at CNN for airing on the network, or publishing on the main CNN site. CNN was a bit coy about future plans, but said in uncertain terms, "This is not a hobby for us." Adding, "As happy as we are with this app, and we worked really hard, there is a Read More

Instead of sifting through the piles of TIME magazines at your doctor's office, where you don't know who's healthy or hands have touched the pages, you now have another option to browse through TIME content on your iPhone. The recently launched TIME Mobile [iTunes link] app provides a better browsing experience and more content than the mobile version of magazine's website. In addition, the app brings with it support for video, which is lacking on the mobile version of TIME's site and not supported for the iPhone on the full version of the site because the videos are encoded in Flash. TIME Mobile also brings a new approach for browsing articles. Like Cover Flow view in the iPhone and iTunes, TIME Mobile's "Image Flow" provides some eye candy in front of the meat and potatoes of the article content. One thing absent in the app is support for offline reading, a useful feature for situations where data connectivity is lacking, such as on an airplane. The USA Today app [iTunes link], which is in the same app genre as TIME Mobile, supports offline reading by tapping on the update button on each section. Perhaps such a feature could be added to TIME Mobile as a paid-for feature, or as for free to those who subscribe to the paper version of the magazine. Update: TIME's app team tells us that offline reading is built-in as part of the app, but for some reason I could not get it to work consistently; we're following up with them to figure out why it's wonky. Powered by Polar, a mobile publishing provider that also powers BusinessWeek [iTunes link] and CNNMoney [iTunes link] iPhone apps as well as a host of other apps on a variety of mobile platforms, TIME Mobile is available as a free download in the App Store. Read More