Our favourite out of office apps

Drinki

Free alcohol. Every day. Yes, you heard right! Get beery without buying. So how does it work? Simply download the app, or get your in-the-know, boozy buddies to hook you up from the ‘refer a mate’ section. Then simply scroll through the bars in your local area that are offering a free tipple and away you crawl.

Just flash your bartender (with your app), they’ll tap a button, you give their service and drink a rating out of five stars and magically a free Bombay Sapphire will appear before your very eyes. The only downside is that it’s only one free drink per day across all bars, so there’s no going on a bill-free bender. Some places do, however, offer discount on your second round, so it’s not all bad news. Also, you don’t get to choose your type of free beverage. Sometimes it’s a Bacardi breezer, or cough up your coppers. It turns out that not just Club Tropicana drinks are free.

Monzo

Can’t remember how many pints you bought at after work drinks? Fear no more. Monzo is watching, always watching. Forgotten nights out are a thing of the past. When you’re not abusing the free treats from Drinki, you can track your spending habits and the late night stumble into McDonald’s from one simple little tool.

Monzo is basically a bank with no branches and purely run online via an app. You may have to wait a while for your card (and they’ll helpfully tell you how many people/days are ahead of you). But fear not, you can queue jump the thousands of others and join the new contactless cult in no time with a little help from your friends. Someone on your dwindling Facebook feed is sure to have a golden ticket waiting for you that brings a Monzo card through your letterbox in no time.

Monzo, unlike most banks, will update you straight away when you’ve used your contactless. Monday overdraft balance shocks are a thing of the past. Instantaneously after making a payment you’ll receive a notification of how much money you’ve spent and where, which is also helpfully categorised. Monzo will tell you how much you’ve spent so far that day, how much is left in your account and you can see what you’ve spent on groceries, bills, entertainment, shopping, etc. in a user-friendly segmented format.

With ease, budgets for nights out, holidays and recurring bills can be set, with what you’ve spent on previous months being visible to help you as a guide. There’s no need to split the bill anymore when dining out. There’ll be no clammy waitress overhead trying to do mental arithmetic of starters, mains and pudding, before forgetting what the amount was she just told you. Simply swipe your share over to your mate and you can be outta there.

Finally, to help you save your pennies (literally) there’s a clever coin jar feature that adds money into a seperate pot every time you spend. It funds itself from taking the difference between your spend and the next round pound - say you spent £2.01, it would automatically transfer 99p into your savings for you. Life is all about balance, after all…

Citymapper

It’s almost impossible to survive in London without a transport app. Uber is all very well and good, but sometimes we all want to live life in the cheap lane, not the fast lane. With hopper fares in action you can get on two buses within the hour on a single fare, so what’s not to love about the capital’s transport system? Well, bus routes. When it’s 2am and you’re no longer able to navigate by using the sun and you’re on the wrong side of town, Citymapper is always there for you. Unless, of course, you’ve run out of battery.

Battery life aside, just simply open the app and tap ‘get me home’ and your route home is perfectly organised for you (as long as you’ve saved your home location). You’ll be informed of where the bus stop/tube stop is on a map, how many stops it is until you need to disembark and exactly how long it will take you to get from A to B.

It’s not just for the small hours though. While you’re frantically untangling a straightening iron or hastily smoothing out your shirt before your 9am, you can tap the ‘get me to work’ button and check that your preferred Underground line hasn’t gone into meltdown before you hit the scrum of commuters at Bank station running against you. Citymapper will now even tell you which part of the train to get on for a smoother exit onto the next leg of your journey. Citymapper even works in 39 different cities across the globe, so it can even direct you home in a city where you don’t speak the local language. Smart.