Recurring Invoices - Back to Basics.
We’ve been asked many times whether or not recurring invoices was possible with Ronin. For a while, we’ve had to say “No” or “This feature is under development.” We always planned to build in this feature, but we wanted to make sure it felt right - that it felt no less intuitive than creating a single invoice.
We eventually built the feature, but decided to hold off on releasing it until we did enough user testing before releasing the feature. As it turns out, the first iteration of it, indeed, wasn’t ideal. What we had designed was a “schedule” that you could assign to many clients. The idea was that freelancers and firms would have standard packages (say a retainer for $x/month) and that you could then put clients into that schedule. Furthermore, it was thought that this would allow the most effecient way of managing the schedules - you would never have to create too many, there would only be a few that you assigned to clients.
After some testing, we realized being technically neat didn’t necessarily make a product more intuitive. In fact, it often works in reverse. The end result just didn’t fit a typical workflow. There were a whole host of issues, but chief among them were that:
- It made recurring schedules feel like too much of a “first-class” feature. We want Ronin to revolve around clients, but the initial design made it feel like schedules owned clients, not the other way around.
- Maintenance of schedules was actually harder, not easier. Once we started considering the ability to “pause” and “resume” schedules, it became a nightmare to display the status of the combination of a schedule and its clients in an intuitive way.
- It was overkill. We realized that it wasn’t very common to have two clients share the exact same schedule (including date, item naming, price, etc.)
Instead, we eventually went back to basics. Creating a recurring schedule is as easy as creating a normal invoice and it’s tracked just like one as well.
Finally, you can now create recurring invoices with Ronin. Enjoy.
