We’re excited to announce that the folks at ZenCash have introduced a cool new integration with Ronin. ZenCash helps automate the painful invoice collections process after an invoice is due and provides for some nice automated features like outgoing phone calls that will help take the stress away from dealing with pesky delinquent clients.

Our goal at Ronin is to provide awesome software that helps you get paid sooner. With features like custom branding and payment integration, we believe that Ronin can help deliver trusted, actionable invoices which dramatically improves payment times. But sometimes, that’s not enough to chase down payment and we think this new ZenCash integration will help some of our users with handling any loose ends.

ZenCash also has some cool features that augment the Ronin experience. For example, they can help you print and send out a Ronin invoice using snail mail or help you mail your customers an iTunes gift card as a thank you note for quick payment.

The best part? ZenCash is free to sign up and you only pay for what you use.

Get Started

Getting started is simple. Check out the guide to get started here: http://welcome.zencash.com/ronin/

ZenCash is also giving away an awesome prize pack of business books to one lucky Ronin customer if you sign up today through May 22, 2012. A winner will be chosen randomly, and handsomely rewarded with Rework by Jason Fried, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh.*

Ronin API

ZenCash is an example of a growing network of apps utilizing the Ronin API. Take a look at our docs to get started with building your own custom integrations!

Welcome ZenCash Users!

If you’re on ZenCash but not yet using Ronin, learn more about our product. Ronin can help you make manage your clients, projects, invoices and estimates. Give our awesome Invoicing and Time-tracking app a try and we’re sure you’ll love it. Try free for 30 days.

* U.S. residents only. Duplicate entries will not be counted.

Ronin is the only invoicing application that really lets you express your brand for both invoices and estimates. We’re always happy to showcase some brilliant examples of this. Today’s example is from Thomas Dobson with Juicy Visuals. Juicy uses Ronin to fully customize their invoices and estimates to fit their energetic brand.

Take a look at their gorgeous presentation.

Even better, Thomas was generous enough to share with us some photos of the stunning invoice design printed on paper.

Now that’s an invoice your clients can’t help but notice.

We’re really excited to announce that a couple of highly requested invoicing features are now live!

Invoice Late Fees

You can now enforce late payment penalties in Ronin. Until today, we’ve held back implementing this since we know not every business collects late fees and we didn’t want to clutter the invoicing flow with more form fields for late fees. We still believe this, but we also understand it’s a vital part of invoicing for some businesses. Ronin lets you choose.

To turn on late fees, simply go to your Account Settings and enable it for your account. Once that’s done, you’ll find that you can now add late fees to any of your invoices.

Ronin not only supports a one-time late fee for past-due invoices, you’re also able to specify a late fee interval (daily, weekly, or monthly) to apply the late fee. This lets you craft your late fee to match your late fee policy.

Invoice Sections

Ronin can also now support invoice sections. Creating a new section is as simple as adding a new section header. This gives you a one line text field that you can use to break your invoice down into logical segments.

We think this is a nice small addition that can make invoices much easier to understand and read, which will hopefully help clients understand your invoices better for fewer disputes.

Invoice section isn’t just for invoices though. You’ll find them available in estimates and recurring schedules as well. This lets you generate invoices from estimates and recurring schedules without losing your sections.

Required changes to Custom Templates

If you’re using Ronin’s default templates, these features are live are ready for you!
If you are using a custom template, you’ll need to change your templates to utilize these new features, so read on:

For late fees, you’ll want to include the {{ invoice.total_late_fees }} value somewhere in your invoice summary. This will give you the total late payment as a separate numeric value based on the current date and the date of any payments.

For invoice sections, you’ll want to include a check for {{ item.section_header? }} to determine if an invoice item is a section header. You’ll want to change the template to render section headers differently than normal invoice items.

Please take a look at our updated default templates (invoice template and estimate template) as a reference for how to use these new values. Also, feel free to ping us at hello@roninapp.com if you have any questions about how the new features interact with your invoice templates.

We’re always looking for ways to improve the manageability of your data in Ronin, and one of the most common requests is for a better way to organize and manage expenses as they’re tracked in Ronin. There were a few implementation options that we considered, but ultimately we decided that adding tags was the best way to help users manage expenses.

Tagging has a few distinct advantages. Tags can be created dynamically, so there doesn’t need to be predefined categorization. Expenses can have multiple tags so that you don’t have to decide on a fixed scheme. Tags can represent anything — names, dates, categories, flags, statuses. Tags can easily be deleted, changed, added to. And lastly, tags are easy to search and filter.

So today, we’re excited to announce that tags are now supported for Expenses and Expense Reports. In addition, we also added tags to Products, so you can easily group or segment your product line.

Here’s an example of what tag input looks like:

As you can see, adding tags to expenses is dead simple. You simply start typing your tag and Ronin will help you select any existing tags you’ve used before. New tags are created if they’re not recognized already. Tags are delimited by commas, so you can even have multi-word tags.

From the Expense Report, you can filter on tags to produce a report specific to your selection. This can help you analyze and break down your expenses beyond just by client.

Tags work very similarly for Products. As you create products, you can create tags for them. Then, in the main products list, you can drill down on a specific tag simply by clicking on a tag. Ronin will show you matching products. Tags are also recognized when you search, giving you another option for filtering your product list.

We think this is a great little feature that will make it easy for our users to better manage their expense and product data. Please feel free to send any and all feedback. Enjoy!

Track your expenses with Ronin

Ronin can help you make manage your Expenses. You can log expenses against clients and projects and then re-bill them via our awesome Invoicing and Time-tracking. Give us a try and we’re sure you’ll be amazed. Try free for 30 days.

Ronin projects are a great way to track tasks and log hours because they help you organize the items that will go into your next invoice. We’ve always believed that projects are useful when they’re equally as manageable for one person and for a group of people. With staff and roles, Ronin projects become a hub of activity, tasks, comments, notes, budgets, invoices and more.

But projects can be so much more then you and your staff. In fact, projects in Ronin also act as a place for third party companies to help you get work done for your clients. With Ronin, inviting a subcontactor is easy. In fact, it’s as easy as sending an email.

Once a contractor accepts your invitation, they’ll have access to their own company account and they’ll have access to your project to log hours. But what’s really useful is that you can use Ronin to directly send tasks to contactors.

Just like internal tasks, these tasks can have due dates. Contractors can only see tasks that have been assigned to them, so any internal tasks are kept private to just you and your staff.

As contractor log hours, they’ll show up on your project’s unbilled hours list. By default, they’ll fall under the some rate as the rest of the project, but more importantly, you can change the rate so that every contractors’ tasks within the project. This can help you capture the costs of the contractor and add your own mark up.

Lastly, because contractors have their own Ronin account, they can invoice you for the costs of their part in the project using Ronin, making it easy for you receive and pay the invoice.

Manage your contractors with Ronin

Organizing your staff and contractor hours is one of the best ways to make sure you bill the proper amount for your projects. Give our awesome Invoicing and Time-tracking app a try and we’re sure you’ll be amazed. Try free for 30 days.

We’re always continuing to improve our Project and Time-tracking functionality at Ronin based on user feedback. Here are a couple of small, but extremely useful new enhancements to Projects that we think everyone will enjoy.

Task Due Notifications

Using Ronin Tasks is one of the easiest and most straightforward ways to coordinate to-do items on Projects. It’s even better now with Task Due Notifications. Ronin can now optionally send you an email on any that you have assigned Tasks that are due. Based on user feedback, this was something that was sorely missing from our initial offering of Tasks, and we couldn’t agree more.

You can turn on Task Due Notifications in your personal notification settings. Keep in mind that this is a personal setting, so it applies only to your user profile and not the entire account.

Project Estimates

Projects and Estimates have great synergy in Ronin. You’ve previously been able to create an Estimate and have it converted into a Project since that’s one of the more common work flows. However, we realized that starting with an open Project and sending numerous, iterative Estimates is also fairly common. In light of this, we’ve now made it easier to manage Estimates within a Project.

You’ll now find that there is a sub-section in each Project that houses the Estimates for a Project. From there you can create new linked Estimates.

This is useful for giving Clients a clear indicator of the state of an evolving Project. From experience, giving your clients good understanding of the costs of a Project is one of the easiest ways to make sure that when comes time to invoice for the work, there are no problems getting payment. We’re excited that this functionality now exists to track, manage, and send new Estimates within a Project.

Manage your projects with Ronin

Ronin can help you make manage your Projects. Give our awesome Invoicing and Time-tracking app a try and we’re sure you’ll be amazed. Try free for 30 days.

We’re excited to announce that Ronin now integrates with Stripe, the full-stack payment processing platform. If you’ve given some thought to processing credit cards, but want to do without the hassle of setting up a merchant account and would prefer to avoid PayPal, Stripe is a brilliant alternative. It takes just minutes to set up and all you need is an API Key to get going with integration in Ronin.

Along with PayPal, Authorize.Net, and Sage Pay, having Stripe integration gives you another option for processing credit cards with Ronin. You can easily enable it via the Payment Integration Settings screen. Note that Stripe is currently only offering their services to US businesses and individuals and the only accepted currency is USD, which is a similar set of restrictions to Authorize.Net.

Stripe Integration also works with our Payment Profiles and Client Managed Payment Profiles features so you can store and save credit cards and manage them (or have your clients manage them) right through Ronin.

Recouping Payment Processing Costs

Like all payment processing systems, Stripe charges a fee for every transaction. The good news is, Ronin offers you the option of passing on that fee to your clients if you wish. This comes in handy in situations where you want to provide options for paying by check, wire-transfer or credit card (which is more convenient). In Ronin, you can choose any percentage of the transaction as a fee.

Get Paid with Ronin

Not yet using Ronin? Stripe integration is just one of many ways we help you get paid. Give our awesome Invoicing and Time-tracking app a try and we’re sure you’ll be amazed. Try free for 30 days.

Ronin has supported Authorize.Net CIM integration with a feature called Payment Profiles for over a year now. While that’s been useful for you, the account owner, it hasn’t really been accessible to your clients. Until now.

We just rolled out some new changes that will allow clients to add and manage their own Payment Profiles.

How does it work? It’s fairly simple. First, you’ll need to turn it on. We realize that not everyone wants their clients adding new Payment Profiles nor does everyone with Authorize.Net integration have CIM available. To opt in, you can simply toggle it in the Payment Integration settings.

Once it’s turned on, you can pretty much let Ronin (and your clients) do the work. When your clients are ready to pay an invoice by credit card, they’ll be given the option to store the credit card for future use.

If a credit card is saved, the next time a client is ready to pay an invoice, they’ll be presented with the new card as an option

Presto. Just like that, they’ll be able to pay invoices via stored Payment Profiles. Best of all, because these client managed Profiles are the same as any other Payment Profile, you can use them to auto-bill recurring invoices. You can also manually charge these stored credit cards whenever you’re creating a new payment record. For client engagements that have flexible spending within a budget, this is the best way to manage payments.

We hope you enjoy this new feature – we think it’s a great way to allow you and your clients to manage stored credit cards from within Ronin.

Get Paid with Ronin

Not yet using Ronin? Authorize.Net integration is just one of many ways we help you get paid. Give our awesome Invoicing and Time-tracking app a try and we’re sure you’ll be amazed. Try free for 30 days.

We’ve been hard at work tuning the Ronin engines, and a few weeks ago, we announced that we’ve made a huge framework migration. What does this mean practically? Well, besides keeping the code up-to-date to the latest, it also means that future improvements are hopefully easier and more efficient to add.

Since then, we’ve been busy making small, but noticeable additions to the Ronin feature-set. While they’re small, they’re features that for which we’ve heard a lot of requests:

Fractional Billing

Ronin now supports invoice item prices at 3 decimals places. While it might not make sense for an hourly rate, we understand that there are lots of business that operate at tiny unit prices (price per word, cycles, megabyte, etc.) where it is especially useful for metered billing. It’s pretty intuitive and doesn’t need much explaining, Ronin will magically handle the math and decide where 2 decimals make sense over two decimals in currency display:

Per-project Timesheet Reports

Previously, Ronin could generate Timesheet reports for any client, any time range, and narrowed down to any staff member. While this was convenient for digging into costs and effort at a client level, it wasn’t very useful for analyzing a particular project. Well, that’s now changed. You can now even narrow Timesheet reports down to the project to give you even more flexible visibility into where you and your staff’s hours are being spent.

Estimate Expirations

One of the more effective ways to get an Estimate or Proposal accepted by a client is to give the Estimate a deadline as an incentive for a client to act. We know this because our customers have shown us examples of their Estimate templates complete with deadline terms. We’re excited to announce that this is now natively supported in Ronin.

You can even access this new Estimate attribute in our custom template system as {{ expiration_date }} and of course, it’s also accessible via our API as expiration_date.

Recurring Invoice Reminders

As much as we like to collect on our invoices, it sometimes takes a bit of nagging to get the client’s attention. Of course, at Ronin, we suggest hand crafted reminders, because they’re known to work better. But, in some cases, when dealing with lots of clients, the process requires some workflow automation.

We’ve supported a singular notification for some time now, but we’ve now also added support for 3, 5, or 7 day recurring notifications. You can easily set your preference as desired in Account Settings.

In a team environment, it can be hard to communicate when a project hits a point where it can be billed. This is especially painful when the project staff is separate from the accounting/invoice staff.

We designed Ronin to recognize that projects go through lifecycles, but we undershot it with just an “Active” and “Closed” state. We’re proud to say that we’ve introduced the concept of “Billable” projects. It’s simple: the team or staff involved in tracking hours and completing tasks in a project knows when it’s “done”. Instead of closing the project permanently, they can now mark the project as billable.

For the invoicing and accounting staff, they’ll be able to recognize this immediately when selecting projects to bill. These projects will show up emphasized in Ronin’s unbilled project selector. Unbilled expenses logged under a billable project will receive the same treatment.

Even if you’re a team of one, it can be helpful to use this as a way to flag completed projects. When invoicing time comes around (whether that’s weekly or monthly for you), it’s a breeze to pick out the projects that are ready for billing.

We think it’s a perfectly simple addition to Projects in Ronin that makes it much easier to manage larger amounts of Projects and Invoices.

Manage your projects with Ronin

Tracking your hours is one of the easiest ways to make sure you bill the proper amount for your projects. Give our awesome Invoicing and Time-tracking app a try and we’re sure you’ll be amazed. Try free for 30 days.