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.

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.

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.

Ronin was built with the idea that small firms and independent contractors should have an easy to use and super-affordable invoicing and client management app in one simple service.

Before we started Ronin, we took a look at existing products out there (and there are plenty) for our own freelance use. After reviewing the options, we decided that people deserve an alternative that doesn’t cost more than the monthly cable bill. Even better, for small businesses with a small number of clients, Ronin should be free. We also wanted something that fits our work flow.

To make all of this feasible, we applied the philosophy from Getting Real into the product that we built – everything you need, nothing you don’t. We built in all the features we feel that we needed in our experience doing freelance work, but we’re always open to more ideas and welcome suggestions to improve our application to what suits our users.

We also believe that companies don’t have to aim to be the next Big Thing. Instead we want to do something small, something important, and something really well. By not trying to be everything for everyone, we can be something useful for you. We hope you enjoy our product.