If you’re like many small businesses, you’re likely already using Google for productivity purposes: email, docs, spreadsheets. You’re also likely using Google Apps to host your domain along with your email and calendaring. Well, we’ve got a great announcement for you: Ronin is now taking our awesome invoicing and time tracking app to the Google Apps Marketplace. Add Ronin Now!

Single Sign On

With Google Apps integration, you can now access Ronin without memorizing another password. If you’re logged in to your Google Apps account, you’re as good as being logged in to Ronin.

The neatest part about this is that for existing Ronin account holders, the Google Apps setup flow will allow you to link your existing Ronin account. This provides another quick way to access your Ronin account where you might already have your other critical apps. (Also check out our Chrome App which gives you one-click access to Ronin from within your Chrome browser.)

For new users the Google Apps Marketplace offers a quick way to get started – we’ll import your basic information from Google Apps and your staff will automatically created when they login to Ronin from within Google Apps for the first time. It makes starting with Ronin even easier than before.

It takes just a few seconds to get setup, so give it a go: Add Ronin to Google Apps.

Not yet on Ronin?

Google Apps integration is just one of hundreds of ways we 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 or add Ronin to your Google Apps now.

We’re excited to announce that the Ronin iPhone Time Tracker is now available in the iTunes AppStore! It’s a sleek, simple app that syncs to your Ronin account and helps provide that much-needed on the go mobility that many of you have been asking for.

It’s a first foray into the mobile space for Ronin so we’d appreciate any feedback, suggestions, and of course, bug tips.

Download it now!

It’s a new year and we’ve got some really exciting things planned for Ronin. Instead of keeping it all to ourselves, we want to share some of the things we’ve been working on. Our new year’s resolution is the same as it is every year: keep getting better. Here’s a partial roadmap for 2011.

Now, these are just some of the big items we’re working on, but please feel free to send over feature suggestions to us via email, twitter, or facebook. We’re always listening for better ways to improve Ronin’s fit with your workflow.

iPhone App

We get lots of questions about this and it’s been something that’s been in the works for quite some time now. We’re dipping our toes into the mobile frontier with a companion time tracking app for Ronin. It’s gorgeous and it’s simple. It’s everything you need for quick, on-the-go tracking of hours when you’re away from the office so you don’t lose a minute. And, pending Apple’s review, it will hopefully be available for download soon. Take a look:

Ronin API

We want to make your data available in anyway you want to use it, whether it’s for integration with third party apps or for custom integration. On top of that, we understand that Ronin is a lego piece in your workflow. There’s no better way to fit with your workflow than to fit with all of the apps you work with.

We’ll soon be making almost all of our data layer available through a RESTful/REST-like JSON API. In fact, our iPhone app was built on top of our API, so it’s already tested in the wild. We’re also looking to work with any and all third parties who want to leverage our API, so make sure to contact us (hello@roninapp.com) if you’re interested. Or, send us integration suggestions and we’ll reach out to third party companies to see if they’re interested in integration.

For a preview, try this cURL:

curl 'https://{yoursite}.roninapp.com/invoices'
-u {youremail}:{yourpassword} -H 'Accept: application/json'

Ronin Affiliate Program

Are you a business consultant, accountant or advisor? Do you often work with businesses or clients who could use some help with their invoicing and time tracking? Do you spread the gospel of Ronin and wish there was some way for Ronin to give back? We want to help you help us.

We’ll soon be releasing an affiliate program to anyone who is interested. Unlike other affiliate programs, Ronin will pay you for the entire lifetime of the referred account. You’ll get paid everytime we get paid. It’s that simple. For now, we are working with select partners so contact us (hello@roninapp.com) if you’re interested.

That’s not all

A year is a long time, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. This coming year promises to be an exciting year for Ronin and for all Ronin users. Here’s to a great 2011 to you and your business!

Use your own logo on Ronin for Invoices and Estimates

Did you know you can customize the logo on your Ronin account to reflect your company or brand? This is the simplest way to customize the look of your Ronin account. The custom logo will also be used on your invoices and estimates, providing the easy branding. This is by far the most important step for taking your online presence to a professional level.

Changing the header background

We’re also excited to announce the much anticipated option to customize the header area with your own background image or background color. This is the perfect compliment to a custom logo and is now available for all paid accounts. Accessing this straightforward and you’ll find it within the Account Settings area.

Not a Ronin yet?

Ronin will help you give a professional impression. Give our awesome Invoicing and Time-tracking app a try and we’re sure you’ll be amazed. Try free for 30 days.

The end of October marks the start of another year for Ronin. Two years ago, we “launched” (by our definition of the word) by opening up our services to our first paying customers.

Here we are two years later, and we couldn’t be more delighted to share the news of our awesome growth over the last 24 months with a sneak peek at our weekly application usage trend:

Here’s the same graph zoomed in for just the last year, which is where most of the growth has happened:

We like where things are going and we’re really excited about the future of our business and the prospect of helping many more businesses grow along with us.

If there is one lesson to be distilled from the last two years it is that there really isn’t a shortcut. This isn’t exactly a new message and it’s been said by many, but it bares repeating. Overnight success takes years. Every success is the result of years of hard work and steady growth.

More web companies should embrace this fact and optimize for the right kind of growth. Instead of front-loading the development process and trying to bust out of the gates to instant success, companies need to take time to refine and sculpt their product through the lens of iterative feedback. Treat this race like the marathon that it is and not the quick dash to riches that too many hope it to be.

In our case, instead of worrying about how to get X users on day one, we wanted to figure out how to get user one to stay X days. By thinking about the product in that way, the questions we ask ourselves are always aligned to benefit the user: “How do we refine the product? How do we reduce friction? What functionality should be add? What nuisances should we kill?” Growth becomes much easier when your product is something you’re proud of. Quality is the multiplier to evangelizing a product. That’s what we focused on two years ago and that’s what we still focus on today.

In fact, one interesting bit of Ronin history is that we never really had a traditional launch. There never was a day where a big button was pressed and champagne was popped.

The reasoning behind this is simple: A traditional launch is basically celebrating the release of a product that probably sucks. That’s because every product that hasn’t had its chance to get in front of users is probably not very good. Products only become great when subjected to real usage and feedback. Instead of a traditional launch, we hand picked an initial audience of people that were in our target market and contacted them. These were our first users and some of them are still our customers.

This gave us a chance to control the initial experience and the number of people exposed to that experience. From the feedback we were able to hone and refine the product, the pricing, the market, and even the message. Only when we got our first paying customer did we really feel like the product had been launched.

Two years later, I’m really proud of where we stand. And, I hope that more companies take our approach to launching (and growing) their product. Launch day is a flash in the pan, but growth and true success takes years.

We’ve just rolled out an update to our system that adds simple searching capabilities to Ronin. Attentive customers would probably have noticed that we’ve had client and contacts search for some time now, but since we’ve released that, we’ve received a lot of requests to move that functionality over to invoices, projects, and estimates.

Search is pretty much straight forward. For invoices and estimates, you can enter your document number, subject, or client name. For projects, you can enter either the project name or client name and the relevant items will show up. For the most part, searches are instantaneous and will return results to you immediately, even with partial keywords.

Give it a go – we really think this small but important update will help everyone kick more invoicing ass.

We’re excited to announce our latest, much requested feature: Autobilling with Recurring Payments. Autobilling allows you easily and securely store your client’s payment information with Ronin, which you can then bill on a recurring basis. This feature will be available for all accounts with Authorize.Net integration enabled. It’s perfect for businesses that are using Ronin to manage weekly, monthly, or yearly contracts.

Also, like every core Ronin feature, it’s absolutely dead simple to use.

Easy Management

You’ll now find that every client has an easily accessible Payment Profile section. You can add credit card information and it will be safely stored away in Authorize.Net’s Customer Information Management system (Authorize.Net integration required).

You can manage multiple Payment Profiles for every client.

Straightforward Billing

Putting a client’s stored Payment Profile to use is as simple as using our Recurring Billing functionality. From any invoice, or from scratch via Recurring Schedule, you can now choose Autobill as a recurring action. Just set it and forget it: Ronin will take of the rest. When successful charges go through, you’ll be notified by email and your client will receive a receipt for payment automatically. When charge failures happen (due to expiration, lack of funds, etc.) Ronin will also let you know and create a draft invoice so you can manage payment manually.

We hope this will really make recurring billing management easy for a lot of Ronin users.

Not yet on Ronin?

Autobilling 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.

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.