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 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.

Part of the process of working with any client is eventually sending an invoice. However, keep in mind that the invoice payment doesn’t mark the end of the relationship. It’s important to realize that an invoice is like any communication with the client – and it needs to be delivered in a on-brand and professional way.

Ronin‘s default invoices are meant to be stylish and modern with general appeal. There is also the more “old-school” print-ready template optimized for black & white printing as well as double-window envelope spacing.

While these templates were designed specifically for a professional look, it might not speak enough to the brand of the business. For this purpose, Ronin users have used the custom template system to create some very uniquely designed invoices.

Default

The default templates serve two purposes: the print-ready PDF template emphasizes the company branding as well as providing a clean table layout for invoice items. The print-ready snail mail template emphasize the placement and positioning of the From and To fields to correspond to the dimensions of a double-window envelope.

Default Invoice Design. Meant to emphasize company branding with a clean look.

Snail mail ready design. The From and To are positioned for double-window envelopes.

Cornish Web Solutions

Cornish Web Solutions (www.cornishwebsolutions.co.uk) needed a complete invoice design that matches their branding and unique style. The primary copy placed via a prominent graphic conveys a personal and inviting tone. Note that Cornish have decided to replace the default invoice column headers with terminology that matches their business and the way the work with their clients.

Cornish Web Solutions. Beautiful image placed flush left on the invoice.

Carla Madden

Carla Madden (www.carlathecopywriter.com) asked her designer Harley Peddie (www.designedafterhours.com) to create an invoice design customized for her:

When it came time to create an invoice, I wanted the design to match that of the website. Because I freelance across various industries, I needed a varied selection of invoice images. We chose Ronin because it featured everything we needed in terms of invoice functionality. Plus, it allowed us to heavily customize the design.

The photograph center-piece on the invoice changes corresponding to the Invoice Subject entered in Ronin. Very clever!

Carla Madden. Invoice designed by Harley Peddie.

Saidur Hossain

Saidur Hossain (http://www.saidur.com)  has this to say about his invoice design:

I am a designer/developer who likes to get to the point, and my invoice does just that. The main thing my clients want to know are “How much?” and “How do I pay?” So right after I answer the first question I give them all the options for payment. Thanks to Ronin’s powerful template system, I was able to put the payment button right on the page and even use Google Fonts to render the dynamic text.

Prominent Invoice Balance and Payment Options highlight this invoice design.

Familiar with HTML/CSS? Know someone who is?

Use Ronin for invoicing and design your own invoice template. Your invoices appear as designed on the web as well as when printed via PDF, giving you the ultimate flexibility in conveying your brand.

If you have an invoice design that you’re proud of, send us a shout-out: and we might include it in a future round-up.

Every once in a while, you might have to deal with a client or project that requires juggling multiple outstanding invoices at once. It can get to a point where there is a need to send out a Statement as a summary of pending invoices. We know this because our awesome users have told us so! In typical Ronin fashion, we thought long and hard about Statements and how we can address the problem for our users – and we’re now excited to announce it as a new feature in Ronin.

Last month, we silently released the Statements feature to the app to get an idea of how it would be used. We think it’s really handy in many cases: Summarizing multiple outstanding invoices, reminding clients of a long overdue invoice, or even serving as a nice printable document to deliver to clients who are particularly picky about having an outstanding balance documented. It can be sent to clients proactively through email, like an invoice, but clients can also view it as a web page from their Account Dashboard or download it as a PDF.

The best part about Statements is that it’s complete customizable using the same system as our invoice templates. This means that you can change the language or design completely to match your invoices and estimate designs. To get started, check out the default statement template.

We hope you’ll enjoy this new feature – we know this is something that’s been a pain point for our users and we’re excited to finally make Statements available.

Not invoicing with Ronin yet?

Invoicing has never been easier. Let Ronin handle invoicing for your business. Try us free.

We know we’ve got quite a few friends across the pond.  So, we’re excited to announce that along with PayPal and Authorize.Net, Ronin now offers a third payment integration option: Sage Pay a leading Payment solution provider in the UK and Ireland.

With Authorize.Net available largely only for US-based merchants and PayPal being somewhat expensive beyond the US borders, Sage Pay integration offers our UK users a more cost-effective way of receiving online payments by credit card.

For those that are interested in setting this up, make sure to carefully follow the set-up instructions – integrating with Ronin requires a minor change to your Sage Pay account settings.

It’s very common practice to apply discounts on invoices to reflect a negotiated discount rate or apply existing credits. Ronin has always supported discount implicitly – negative line item amounts were always taken into account properly. However, they have never been presented in a very pleasing way in Ronin, causing potential confusing.

We’re happy to say that we’ve updated the system to treat discounts as a first class citizen on the display end. Here is an example:

As shown in the screenshot, Ronin now displays negative amounts in parenthesis, which is standard practice and also exposes the total discounts as a line item in the invoice summary.

Using a custom template?

You can use discounts in your templates as well! You’ll find {{ invoice.total_discount }} and {{ invoice.total_gross }} available for use. Take a look at our default invoice template for sample usage.

Not using Ronin yet?

Time to ditch your current billing system and give Ronin a spin. 30 days trial. No commitments, just invoicing joy.