Business & Document Apps for Mac, iPhone & iPad

Invoicing, PDF conversion and scanning, face blurring, and on-screen keystrokes for demos - work tools for Mac, iPhone and iPad that keep client data on your own device.

The work nobody starts a business to do: invoices, scans, and the material you hand to other people. Send invoices, turn photos and scans into clean PDFs, record a demo with every shortcut visible, and blur faces or plates before anything is published - all processed on your own device. Client names, contract scans and identifiable faces never touch a third-party server, because there is no server to touch.
4 apps in this category

Why on-device matters more for work documents than for anything else

Most people meet these tasks through a free web tool: a site that converts an image to PDF, merges two files, or blurs a photo. It works, and it means uploading the document to a server owned by someone you have never heard of.

For a holiday photo that is a fair trade. For work it usually is not, because of what the files actually contain:

  • An invoice carries a client's name, address, and often your bank details.
  • A scanned contract or ID carries the whole thing, in full resolution.
  • A photo of a shop, a site, or an event carries identifiable faces and plates, including people who never agreed to appear anywhere.

Every app in this category does its work locally. There is no upload step, no account, and no copy of the file left behind on someone else's disk.

A small-business paper workflow

The three apps line up in the order the work usually happens.

Capture. PDF Maker scans a paper document with the camera, finds the edges, and produces a straight, cropped PDF rather than a photo of a page at an angle. It also merges, compresses, flattens and rotates, which covers the awkward jobs that normally send people to a web converter - scanning documents with your phone and merging PDF files on a Mac go through both.

Bill. Invoice Maker turns a job into an invoice, estimate or receipt as a PDF, with nine templates, taxes, recurring billing, and over 150 currencies for clients abroad. If you are writing your first one, how to write an invoice as a freelancer covers what has to be on it - and chasing a late invoice covers what happens when it is ignored.

Publish. Face Blur AI finds faces, licence plates and other identifying detail in photos and video and blurs them before anything goes out. See blurring faces before posting photos.

Material you make for other people to watch

The other half of this work is not paperwork at all: the demo you record for a client, the training video for a new hire, the walkthrough you screen-share on a call. It is the same job - producing something someone else will look at - and it has the same privacy problem.

GlowKeys draws every keystroke and shortcut on screen as you type, which is the difference between a viewer following along and a viewer asking what you just pressed. Six themes, optional typing sounds and click ripples, and it renders locally rather than through a capture service - showing keystrokes on screen and recording your Mac screen cover the setup.

It pairs with Face Blur AI more often than people expect. A screen recording of real software tends to contain real data - a customer list, a name in a sidebar, a face in a video call - and Face Blur works on video as well as stills, so the recording can be cleaned before it is sent out rather than re-shot with dummy data.

Frequently asked questions

Do these apps need an account or an internet connection?

No account, and the document work itself runs on the device. Nothing is uploaded to be converted, and no copy of an invoice or a scan is stored anywhere but on your own machine.

Can I invoice a client in another currency?

Yes - Invoice Maker supports over 150 currencies, along with tax handling and recurring billing, so overseas clients and repeat retainers are covered without a separate tool.

Does PDF Maker scan paper, or only convert files I already have?

Both. It scans with the camera using automatic edge detection, so a photographed page comes out cropped and squared rather than skewed, and it also converts, merges, compresses, flattens and rotates existing files.

Is blurring faces enough to satisfy privacy rules like GDPR?

Face Blur removes the identifying detail from the image before you publish it, which is the practical step people are usually looking for. Whether that meets a specific legal obligation depends on your situation and jurisdiction, and is not something we can advise on - if the stakes are real, check with someone who can. See also sharing photos of children safely.

Can I blur sensitive data out of a screen recording, not just a photo?

Yes - Face Blur works on video as well as stills, so a demo recording that caught a customer name or a face in a call can be cleaned afterwards instead of being re-recorded against dummy data.

Which platforms do these run on?

Invoice Maker, PDF Maker and Face Blur AI run on iPhone, iPad and Mac. GlowKeys is macOS only, since it draws over a desktop screen recording. Other work-adjacent tools - file cataloguing with FileLister, text conversion with TextLab - are in Utilities and AI & Photo / Dev.