Advisor Technology   |   05/11/2016

Our 9 Favorite Chrome Extensions and Apps for Advisors

There are a lot of ways to save time in your work day, but one of our favorite time hacks is using web browser extensions. Browser extensions are a great way to speed up normal, everyday tasks so you can power through work faster. What is an extension? It’s a small software installed directly in your browser that adds some useful functionality to your web experience.

Most major web browsers support extensions now, but today we’ll be focusing on the browser with the most widely supported library: Google Chrome.

Awesome Screenshot

Essential for:

• Whole-page screenshots

• Marking up screenshots

Screenshots are handy when you’re trying to tell your clients how to use your website. But sometimes you want a picture that’s bigger than the size of your screen.

You could take a screenshot, scroll down a bit, take another screenshot, scroll down a bit, take another screenshot, and then send an email to your client with five attachments and tell them which order to open the attachments in so it makes sense. Or you could spend the time stitching all those screenshots together into one PDF. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Awesome Screenshot lets you take screenshots of the entire webpage. It’s fantastic.

On top of that, this extension lets you write on your screenshots. If you want to give a client or coworker instructions via email of how to use a website, or maybe you want to give a designer specific instructions on what you want changed in your latest newsletter, it can be hard to explain exactly what you want over email, but marking up an image help you clearly communicate what you need.

Send Anywhere

Essential for:

• Easily sending any number of files, no matter how large

Chances are you use some sort of cloud storage for file sharing, or maybe you share documents the old school way by sending them back and forth in emails. The problem with that method is that sometimes you have a huge file that won’t fit in an email and you don’t want to take up space with it on the cloud.

Enter Send Anywhere. Using this plugin, you can send any number of files of any size (seriously, they claim there is no limit to the file size, and I haven’t found a limit yet). You’ll get a link you can share with anyone, but be quick about it! The link is only good for 10 minutes (at least in the free version).

HYFY

Essential for:

• Creating short tutorial videos for clients and employees

Every client is unique, but not every question is. Advisors often get the same question over and over, so why not record your answers and just email them a link? These videos could be used for several website questions:

• How to log in to your portfolio
• How to view blog posts by categories
• How to use a partner’s site

HYFY is a simple, easy-to-use screen recording extension for Chrome that allows you to record up to three-minute clips and share with anyone using just a link (the paid version allows longer recordings). Note: HYFY can only record content within one tab per video. If you need full-screen recordings of multiple tabs, we recommend Recordit, but you’ll have to install it as it doesn’t have a Chrome extension version.

Harvest Time Tracker

Essential for:

• Tracking employee time

If you want to know how your team is spending its time, this extension makes it super easy to compile everyone’s time in one place. We use one of the paid tiers as the free version only covers one user, but the pricing is reasonable.

Instapaper

Essential for:

• Saving articles to read offline

When I get on a plane, I always wish I had a stockpile of the most interesting columns and articles from around the web to read, but I just can’t bring myself to spend the extra $8 for in-flight WiFi. Instapaper lets you easily save articles to read offline later, so you’ll never be stuck reading the in-flight magazine over and over again.

1Password

Essential for:

• Managing all your passwords

This extension makes this entire app worthwhile. Click the little 1Password icon and it will automatically detect what site you’re on and fill in your login details. You can save as many passwords as you want. Gone are the days of resetting your password every time you want to log in to a website you haven’t visited in a while.

Modern New Tab Page

Essential for:

• An improved tab experience

This extension gives you a good looking new tab with tile-sized links to your preset list of whatever sites you want. You can customize the picture in the background, too. Bonus: note the “Recently Closed” box in the bottom right. This is a must for those times when you accidentally shut everything down and wish you could remember all the pages you had open.

feedly Mini

Essential for:

• Saving your favorite news and news sites

We love feedly. This is a simple way to add any news site to your feeds or save an article for later. In addition, it gives you options for sharing through social channels and email and saving to Evernote. Note: This extension appears in the bottom-right corner of your screen when you add it rather than in the top right where extensions usually go.

Page Analytics (by Google)

Essential for:

• Seeing how your website is doing

Sign up for a free Google Analytics account and then install this extension for a quick snapshot of how your website is performing. This tells you how many people are currently on your site, how many have been there in the last month, the bounce rate, and more.

That’s it for now, but we’ll be back with more. Great new extensions seem to pop up every day.

Having trouble installing or making sense of any of these extensions? Drop us a line.

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