Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Stripe Tax Story

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 299 posts

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#11

Post by cmckn »

sbierwagen wrote: post #2

He wasn't collecting address information for US customers, so the invoices hung in a pending state. He didn't check to make sure the integration was working correctly until a customer emailed him to ask why they hadn't been billed three months later, so there were a lot of invoices to clean up, which he apparently found to be very annoying.

I think he's correct that the failure mode was pretty awful. Silence isn't a great approach for failures in your cash flow. But, I agree with you that at least some of this can be chalked up to a botched integration, and that he probably could have reacted to bad signs more proactively (i.e. the drop in income).

Still, the Stripe folks could have at least offered to help him collect the back payments, and (better yet) send an email to his customers taking the blame for this (which would cost them nothing and would reduce the harm to his business).

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#12

Post by dannyw »

edwinwee wrote: post #3

(I work at Stripe.) This was a painful read. I'm sorry. We could have done a lot better. We're working on remediations now, and we're sending another, corrected email tonight with the updated CSV file of failed invoices as of March 1st.

Please consider a financial goodwill payment instead of only sending updated CSVs.

You charge an extra fee for Stripe Tax; your paying product had an issue.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#13

Post by tarr11 »

This is why you need a good bookkeeper who will catch things like this when doing monthly reconciliation.

There are so many ways that billing can fail and they all result in cash flow problems which is incredibly stressful.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#14

Post by spamizbad »

I've noticed Stripe products tend to be buggy and/or half-finished. What's the deal with that? Anyone know why a company with so much talent and great product that seem polished seem to have critical issues?

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#15

Post by [deleted] »

pxue wrote: post #10
sleepytimetea wrote: post #7

Is there an extra fee for this Stripe Tax integration extra ? If not a separate fee, will they refund partially given that no alerts or alarms were raised for this behaviour ? All I can say is they probably built this in a hurry and the workflows weren't really tested or checked by humans. I call it "But CI is green" syndrome.

Yes. it's 0.5% per payment* on top of 0.4% per "invoice". Quite hefty fees considering credit card fee is 2.9%

[deleted]

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#16

Post by anonymouse008 »

pxue wrote: post #10
sleepytimetea wrote: post #7

Is there an extra fee for this Stripe Tax integration extra ? If not a separate fee, will they refund partially given that no alerts or alarms were raised for this behaviour ? All I can say is they probably built this in a hurry and the workflows weren't really tested or checked by humans. I call it "But CI is green" syndrome.

Yes. it's 0.5% per payment* on top of 0.4% per "invoice". Quite hefty fees considering credit card fee is 2.9%

Woa I’m selecting payment processors right now — does this mean the “subscription” / “billing” fees of 0.5% are on top of the 2.9%?!

https://stripe.com/billing

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#17

Post by blcArmadillo »

sarlalian wrote: post #8
sbierwagen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the post he says: >I had noticed that my cashflow for the previous 2-3 months seemed to be tanking a bit A bit? Revenue from all US customers went to zero for three months! That should have been a giant hole. This is like driving your car into a lake, hearing a "bang" as the engine explodes, then complaining that there's no "you have driven into a lake" warning light on the dashboard.

You are assuming that a large number of their customers are from the U.S. not knowing what business they are in, their customer pool might be 90% Canadian. The whole world doesn't necessarily target U.S. customers.

They did say

> I deployed it on November 6, 2021, the same day that Stripe stopped billing a significant number of my customers, left all their invoices in a Draft state, and didn’t tell me about it.

So at least a significantly large portion are outside of Canada.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#18

Post by dabernathy89 »

I'm not quite understanding the need to put them on blast here. Yes, they should have been more apologetic and they should certainly have escalated your ticket more quickly. But they made the changes you wanted seen: better documentation & better process, and reaching out to customers proactively when they see this problem.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#19

Post by droopyEyelids »

civilized wrote: post #4
sbierwagen wrote: post #2

He wasn't collecting address information for US customers, so the invoices hung in a pending state. He didn't check to make sure the integration was working correctly until a customer emailed him to ask why they hadn't been billed three months later, so there were a lot of invoices to clean up, which he apparently found to be very annoying.

> He didn't check to make sure the integration was working correctly But what is your definition of "check to make sure the integration was working correctly"? Once you know what was going wrong, it's easy but unhelpful to say "you should have checked to see if that thing was going wrong". He had dashboards indicating "situation normal", and there was no specific advice that he check that an avalanche of draft invoic…

If anyone is interested in this topic, I recommend the book "Field Guide to Understanding Human Error" by Sidney Dekker

It's an incredibly thorough treatment of the incentives and psychology that lead to people labeling process failures as 'human error'.

Most of the book deals with manufacturing, aviation, and air control failures, but the principles generalize so easily to software development that it's a treat to read. One thing that makes it so good is that I was vaguely aware of most of what he covers before having read it, but reading him stitch it all together brought me to the point of intuitively understanding the concepts that had been floating in the back of my mind, and being able to see them all around me at work. He puts it together so smoothly that after having read it, it felt like I always knew what I had just learned.

It's super expensive on amazon https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error... but available on all the online library sites that aren't for linking in polite company. It's also on audible.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#20

Post by gjsman-1000 »

spamizbad wrote: post #14

I've noticed Stripe products tend to be buggy and/or half-finished. What's the deal with that? Anyone know why a company with so much talent and great product that seem polished seem to have critical issues?

I thought I was crazy looking at their API and thinking it was crap because everyone seems to praise the Stripe API. I ran into undocumented sections around line items for Checkout objects, and the whole loop-around to go from Checkout Session -> Payment Intent -> Charge Information -> Order Information -> Line Items (or whatever order the 4 separate, synchronous requests our app has to do to get cart line items) is overly complicated.

Like, why do we even need Payment Intent? I just want to make a Checkout session, set a few variables, and have it return whether the same Checkout session was successful or not, how much was charged, and the line items for it in one request, not four, five if unoptimized.

Post reply on HN