Design and Development

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.