Ronin Blog

Today we’re introducing our new Tasks functionality. Tasks offers a simple, straightforward way to manage assignable to-do items to your staff and team members. It’s perfect for companies who want to use Ronin to manage their day-to-day project progress and acts as a great companion to our existing Time-Tracking features.

Best of all, it’s available immediately for all plans, both free and paid.

Keep track of Project Tasks

Creating a new Task is easy and allows you to specify optional due dates and assignees. Every project comes with it’s own list of Tasks and every staff member has their own list of assigned tasks. Everyone can easily glance at all tasks from Ronin’s Dashboard.

Tasks are conversational

With every task you can add additional comments to provide context. Task threads can help your team stay in sync.

At-a-glance project status

Tasks will also update your project list with a small badge indicating the number of open tasks left for a project. This way, Ronin can help you manage budget, time, and progress all under one roof.

Track Time against Tasks

Ronin will automatically help pre-populate your time sheet entries with existing task items.

Needless to say, we’re very excited to be bringing this new functionality to our users. Much thanks to everyone who gave their input and helped us refine this product!

Not yet on Ronin?

Tasks is just one of many ways Ronin can help your business. Give our awesome Invoicing and Time-tracking app a try and we’re sure you’ll be amazed. Try free for 30 days.

Effective July 1st, 2010, the British Columbia and Ontario provinces of Canada will be switch to a new taxation scheme which affects a large number of Ronin users.

Fortunately, we designed our sales tax invoicing flow to be flexible enough to provide room for all the various sales tax schemes in the U.S., Canada, UK, and most of Europe. (If there’s anything we can do to better support your country, make sure to shoot an email to Support.)

Our users have already taken notice. Kevin S. from Canada writes:

Hi, love the app. Not sure if you are aware of the HST (Harmonized Sales Tax) in British Columbia and Ontario being introduced July 1st, but Canadian businesses in these provinces now require 3 or 4 different tax rates depending on where their clients are located. I wanted to say thanks for taking a free-form approach with tax rates which allows specifying any tax rate on a per-invoice basis… Please just don’t ever change how you are currently handling taxes

Ronin’s free form approach to invoices is an explicit recognition that sometimes, you can never be sure you’re right - so let your users decide:

Ah but there’s a surprise. We also just added compound taxation for our friends in Quebec. With a simple click, you can compound taxes, in the case where the GST is applied to the PST rate:

Need an invoicing solution that does it right?

Get Started with Ronin today.

Sometimes, when you’re dealing with Big Corp, the fastest way to get paid is still via an old-school snail-mail invoice straight to their account department. Lots of Ronin users have asked for a way to print out invoices in a format that works just right with common windowed envelopes so that the from and to address fields show up just right.

Previously, we’ve always recommended using our Custom Templates functionality to lay out the invoices, but as we got more and more requests, we realized that invoices sometimes need to have two-faces: one for the design friendly web and the other for more traditional envelope/snail-mail based world.

So we thought we’d save everyone some time and release a snail-mail ready PDF link:

Clicking this will give you an nice 2-window envelope compatible invoice PDF that you can mail off to your clients the old-school way.

For our HTML/CSS savvy users - This new PDF is also customizable. You’ll find a new template section that will allow you to tweak the HTML/CSS of this snail-mail invoice. You can use this to change specific wording, add your logo, or change the language of the invoice.

There have been quite a few requests and frankly, there’s no excuse for the long wait. However, we’re pleased to say that Ronin now supports PO numbers on invoices. More specifically, you can enter any alphanumeric sequence you want, just like Ronin invoice numbers.

Take a look:

For the custom invoice folks out there, you can add PO numbers to your existing templates with this liquid snippet:

{% if invoice.po != blank %}
    {{ invoice.po }}
{% endif %}

We’re pleased to announce that a long awaited feature is now available for certain Ronin plans: Custom Domains.

You can now run Ronin on your own custom domain so that the application is a more integrated part of your service business. This is perfect for businesses that don’t want Ronin’s domain (roninapp.com) to be client-facing.

It’s also fairly simple and straightforward to get started. There are only two simple steps. Although, you’ll need to put on your sysadmin hat to add a CNAME record so that you’re pointing your subdomain to Ronin.

Take a look at the following screenshot, which pretty much explains all you need to know:

Please visit our Plans & Pricing page for details on plan inclusion.

You’ll now find that all Ronin accounts come with a simple expense tracking feature. It’s straightforward and the goal is simple: To allow you to track expenses incurred on behalf of clients and re-bill them during invoicing.

The interface is self explanatory:

You can easily add new expenses and view them under the “Expenses” tab.

Where it gets interesting is when it comes time to invoice your client, you’ll find that Ronin automatically detects any outstanding expenses that have not been invoiced:

Along with time tracking, we hope this provides a comprehensive tool for tracking what you’re owed so you never have to go through the trouble of under-invoicing.

As a team grows, it can often become more difficult to track the total hours spent in the last week or month how much much of it is left to bill. The more readily available this information, the easier it is to make sure invoices are sent at regular intervals.

For example, do you know off the top of your head how many billable hours you or your team has put in this week? How about how many of those hours are left to bill to your clients? Do you know how much money you’re leaving on the table on a monthly basis?

Ronin helps answer these questions at a glance with our new Projects dashboard numbers. The screenshot below really summarizes all you need to know about it:

What’s also neat about this dashboard is that it shows you your oldest unbilled hours. For example, if you know you have $1,000 unbilled over 15 days, that means you’ve got unbilled hours from 15 days ago that you haven’t translated into an invoice.

When it comes to getting paid, the closer the services render is to the invoice date, the less likely you’ll have invoice disputes. Factoring in any payment leeway you might offer your clients (e.g. Net 30), this gives you a good idea of how long the cycle is from doing the work to receiving the payment.

This is a new feature that’s available for all accounts, free or paid (although paid accounts will benefit a little more from it, since it becomes more useful with more staff), so make sure you take a look!

Paid accounts will find a new goodie available just in time for taxes (if you live in the US): invoice and payment reporting capabilities. We’ve always been focused on keep the main Ronin invoice UI as simple as possible. Unfortunately, that’s meant that it hasn’t been as easy as needed to slice and dice the numbers. In particular, it’s hard to break down incoming (accrued or cash) by a given week, month, or year.

Now, with the release of reporting, this functionality is available under a new “Reports” tab:

Of course, there’s more to come. We’re certainly planning to release more reporting functionality in the near future. But, hopefully, this gets our users started with the most important aspect of invoicing: tracking your income!

The world-wide response to the earthquake in Haiti has been encouraging. However, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the effort will be ongoing. Rebuilding a country that has been so damaged by this disaster is not something that will only require our help for a few weeks.

Buy Ronin. Donate to Haiti. Win-win.

Here at Ronin, we want to pitch in in our own little way. From the publishing of this post to the end of February, Ronin will be donating all proceeds from the first month of new accounts to the recovery effort in Haiti.

Learn More about the Haiti Relief Effort

Google has set up a page where you can learn more about the effort in Haiti: http://www.google.com/relief/haitiearthquake/. They’ve got some Google Earth imagery that offers a glimpse into the post-earthquake condition of Haiti. There are also numerous links there that offer information on various ways you can get involved directly either by cash or in-kind donations.

It’s easy to get involved

You can also help immediately by donating to the Red Cross to assist the relief effort. Contribute online to the Red Cross, or donate $10 to be charged to your cell phone bill by texting “HAITI” to “90999.”

We run plenty of usability studies here at Ronin. We run them so commonly, that we think of them as taste tests - it’s only any good if it fits the palettes of the everyday user. A certain magic happens when you combine the rich feedback mechanism that is usability studies with the instant gratification medium of the web applications.

Everytime we conduct a study, we walk away with plenty of improvement ideas. Then, we sort them in priority (including bonus points for biggest-bang-for-buck features) and we add them into the product, usually within one or two days. Simple as that. While that may seem mundane, it’s really only possible with the appliction distribution model of web-based applications. Instead of building and compiling the next version of software as an incremental release that our users have to download, we can ship it to them without them even knowing.

Case in point, after the last round of usability studies, we’ve made the following improvements, all of which were released Sunday evening, waiting for use on Monday morning:

• The ‘amount’ field during adding of payments is automatically filled out with the remaining balance of the invoice. This is so often the case, and it’s a big win for efficiency.
• Removed requirement that a ‘note’ be filled out during payment creation.
• Added two links to edit “from address” (and other additional informational fields, like tax ID) and “to address” right in the invoice interface. The most common case of client creation is during the invoice creation flow and additional address information is usually a necessary addition afterwards.
• Change the invoice summary section to read “Total Due” instead of “Remaining Balance” when there haven’t been any payments, partial or whole. Removed unnecessary tax information from the invoice summary when the invoice is taxless.
• Improved the invoice comments UI by moving up next to payments as a column. We noticed a lot of users mentally filtered out the comments section because it was so low and hidden on the page.

This is just one set of improvements we’ve made, but changes like this happen almost on a daily basis. Sometimes they’re big, sometimes they’re small, but they’re hopefully always a step in the right direction.