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 always continuing to improve our Project and Time-tracking functionality at Ronin based on user feedback. Here are a couple of small, but extremely useful new enhancements to Projects that we think everyone will enjoy.

Task Due Notifications

Using Ronin Tasks is one of the easiest and most straightforward ways to coordinate to-do items on Projects. It’s even better now with Task Due Notifications. Ronin can now optionally send you an email on any that you have assigned Tasks that are due. Based on user feedback, this was something that was sorely missing from our initial offering of Tasks, and we couldn’t agree more.

You can turn on Task Due Notifications in your personal notification settings. Keep in mind that this is a personal setting, so it applies only to your user profile and not the entire account.

Project Estimates

Projects and Estimates have great synergy in Ronin. You’ve previously been able to create an Estimate and have it converted into a Project since that’s one of the more common work flows. However, we realized that starting with an open Project and sending numerous, iterative Estimates is also fairly common. In light of this, we’ve now made it easier to manage Estimates within a Project.

You’ll now find that there is a sub-section in each Project that houses the Estimates for a Project. From there you can create new linked Estimates.

This is useful for giving Clients a clear indicator of the state of an evolving Project. From experience, giving your clients good understanding of the costs of a Project is one of the easiest ways to make sure that when comes time to invoice for the work, there are no problems getting payment. We’re excited that this functionality now exists to track, manage, and send new Estimates within a Project.

Manage your projects with Ronin

Ronin can help you make manage 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.

We’ve been hard at work tuning the Ronin engines, and a few weeks ago, we announced that we’ve made a huge framework migration. What does this mean practically? Well, besides keeping the code up-to-date to the latest, it also means that future improvements are hopefully easier and more efficient to add.

Since then, we’ve been busy making small, but noticeable additions to the Ronin feature-set. While they’re small, they’re features that for which we’ve heard a lot of requests:

Fractional Billing

Ronin now supports invoice item prices at 3 decimals places. While it might not make sense for an hourly rate, we understand that there are lots of business that operate at tiny unit prices (price per word, cycles, megabyte, etc.) where it is especially useful for metered billing. It’s pretty intuitive and doesn’t need much explaining, Ronin will magically handle the math and decide where 2 decimals make sense over two decimals in currency display:

Per-project Timesheet Reports

Previously, Ronin could generate Timesheet reports for any client, any time range, and narrowed down to any staff member. While this was convenient for digging into costs and effort at a client level, it wasn’t very useful for analyzing a particular project. Well, that’s now changed. You can now even narrow Timesheet reports down to the project to give you even more flexible visibility into where you and your staff’s hours are being spent.

Estimate Expirations

One of the more effective ways to get an Estimate or Proposal accepted by a client is to give the Estimate a deadline as an incentive for a client to act. We know this because our customers have shown us examples of their Estimate templates complete with deadline terms. We’re excited to announce that this is now natively supported in Ronin.

You can even access this new Estimate attribute in our custom template system as {{ expiration_date }} and of course, it’s also accessible via our API as expiration_date.

Recurring Invoice Reminders

As much as we like to collect on our invoices, it sometimes takes a bit of nagging to get the client’s attention. Of course, at Ronin, we suggest hand crafted reminders, because they’re known to work better. But, in some cases, when dealing with lots of clients, the process requires some workflow automation.

We’ve supported a singular notification for some time now, but we’ve now also added support for 3, 5, or 7 day recurring notifications. You can easily set your preference as desired in Account Settings.

In a team environment, it can be hard to communicate when a project hits a point where it can be billed. This is especially painful when the project staff is separate from the accounting/invoice staff.

We designed Ronin to recognize that projects go through lifecycles, but we undershot it with just an “Active” and “Closed” state. We’re proud to say that we’ve introduced the concept of “Billable” projects. It’s simple: the team or staff involved in tracking hours and completing tasks in a project knows when it’s “done”. Instead of closing the project permanently, they can now mark the project as billable.

For the invoicing and accounting staff, they’ll be able to recognize this immediately when selecting projects to bill. These projects will show up emphasized in Ronin’s unbilled project selector. Unbilled expenses logged under a billable project will receive the same treatment.

Even if you’re a team of one, it can be helpful to use this as a way to flag completed projects. When invoicing time comes around (whether that’s weekly or monthly for you), it’s a breeze to pick out the projects that are ready for billing.

We think it’s a perfectly simple addition to Projects in Ronin that makes it much easier to manage larger amounts of Projects and Invoices.

Manage your projects with Ronin

Tracking your hours is one of the easiest 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.

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.

For a small team, it’s fairly easy to track and log hours with Ronin so that logged task entries and descriptions are kept in a detailed way, ready for invoicing. By using Ronin’s unbilled project selector, you can quickly drop in any unbilled hours and, for the most part, the invoice items created will be nicely presentable to your clients. You can always use our nice drag and drop functionality to re-order items or use Textile markup to spruce up the invoice items for presentation, but usually, there isn’t much more work needed.

Our project selector helps you invoice projects. But it's now even better!

However, if you manage a company with multiple staff users with various roles, you’ve probably noticed that at some point, it gets hard to manage all of the hours tracked against a single project. Typically, the individually logged hours might start containing verbose descriptions, meant more internal consumption and tracking rather than for final invoicing.

We’ve noticed this use case cropping up more and more – and of course, we’ve listened to your feedback about it as well.

To address this, we’ve introduced a neat (and we think intuitive) trick that will help you manage this: When you create invoice items from project hours, if you choose not to include task dates or descriptions, Ronin will automatically roll up all of the hours into a single invoice item with the name of the project as the description. All of the actual tracking of the billed status of each of the logged hours will automagically be tracked for you.

If you choose to omit task details, Ronin will now roll up all logged hours into a single Invoice line

We think this will really help clean up invoices and will help you or your accounting staff spend less time shuffling or cleaning up invoice items manually. Give it a go. We’d love to hear your continued feedback on this feature or any other part of our product!

Not tracking time with Ronin?

Tracking your hours is one of the easiest 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.

If you’re a Mac OS X user, you might be thinking that have your online invoicing tool handy and ready to go on your desktop would be a great thing. Well, Ronin is now, by default, compatible with Fluid. Using Fluid you can easily dock Ronin to your desktop making it as easily accessible as your favorite Desktop apps. All you’ll need to do is install Fluid and we’ll take care of serving up a nice graphical icon to compliment your dock.

Here’s what it looks like: