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

61–70 of 299 posts

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#61

Post by ksec »

danity wrote: post #47

Sad to see Stripe fall to the bean counters instead of staying focused on customers. They were coming out with some cool innovations a few years ago. Even "don't be evil" Google is moving in this direction. Not sure why companies always evolve this way. Boeing is another prime example. Apple has maintained its focus on the customer and thrived, bucking the trend, which seems like it would be motivation for others to…

> Apple has maintained its focus on the customer and thrived, bucking the trend

They are arguably best in the industry doesn't mean they are as good as they once were. Apple Retail experience, App Store curation. Butterfly Keyboard? If if it trend we are talking about then Apple is no different to other company you mentioned.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#62

Post by dabernathy89 »

nrmitchi wrote: post #26
dabernathy89 wrote: post #18

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.

I suspect, because I have been in a similar situation before, that the author is frustrated because the company first ignored/downplayed the significance of his concern, then blamed his issue on user error (without accepting responsibility), and then quietly modified their documentation and addressed the issue as if they had "just discovered it". When companies behave this way it feels like you're being gaslit, which…

> then quietly modified their documentation and addressed the issue as if they had "just discovered it"

As he points out in the article, they alerted him to the documentation updates in the course of their emails back and forth.

Fair point about being frustrated with the initial customer support experience, though. Definitely crappy.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#63

Post by HWR_14 »

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #57
ovao wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, in this case, the author was tracking his KPIs, and those suggested that all was hunky dory, but what he wasn’t tracking were the actual payments being received against invoices that never converted to an open state. In this case, the invoices were left in a draft state on Stripe’s side. And who could’ve expected that they’d need to occasionally check for draft invoices? It seems like it wasn’t made clear…

This sounds like something good old fashioned double-entry bookkeeping would have caught immediately (hunky dory income from Stripe seemingly falling into a black hole). No need to scrutinize every transaction until you notice the ledger isn't adding up.

Double entry booking would have shown a growing accounting accounts receivable and an undersized cash account. Sure, you might dig into why that is, but it wouldn't leap out.

Heck, in many ways, double entry bookkeeping on the accrual basis would be less likely to notice it.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#64

Post by HWR_14 »

chrissnell wrote: post #41

My dad owns a successful chain of bicycle stores in Texas. He’s been in business for almost 51 years and he’s one of the largest bike dealers by volume in the country. He has nearly a hundred employees and a bookkeeper. Despite having a proverbial dozen balls in the air at any time and despite having people on the payroll to do bookkeeping, he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, a…

It doesn't sound like he reconciles the ERP system to the bank statements every night. That seems to be the appropriate analog. Meanwhile, the author was monitoring all the KPIs, so they were looking at what they should look at.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#65

Post by asrossbach »

stagger87 wrote: post #56
danity wrote: post #47

Sad to see Stripe fall to the bean counters instead of staying focused on customers. They were coming out with some cool innovations a few years ago. Even "don't be evil" Google is moving in this direction. Not sure why companies always evolve this way. Boeing is another prime example. Apple has maintained its focus on the customer and thrived, bucking the trend, which seems like it would be motivation for others to…

You're making some huge hand wavy statements based on this single anecdote...

As someone who has used Stripe over the past 5 years for large scale e-commerce and marketplace startups Stripe has dropped the ball quite significantly over the past two or so years. Their customer support has gotten worst, their communication to customers has faltered quite a bit and they're starting to nickel and dime their customers for basic features (like support that responds within a day or two).

I wouldn't go as far as to say they've fallen to the "bean counters" but they definitely aren't as customer obsessed as they have been in the past and quite a few gaps in their armor are becoming obvious.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#66

Post by alexashka »

chrissnell wrote: post #41

My dad owns a successful chain of bicycle stores in Texas. He’s been in business for almost 51 years and he’s one of the largest bike dealers by volume in the country. He has nearly a hundred employees and a bookkeeper. Despite having a proverbial dozen balls in the air at any time and despite having people on the payroll to do bookkeeping, he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, a…

Blaming the victim, wonderful.

When I step on your toe, you should apologize to me, because you could've been more mindful of your surroundings and prevented it.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#67

Post by ovao »

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #57
ovao wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, in this case, the author was tracking his KPIs, and those suggested that all was hunky dory, but what he wasn’t tracking were the actual payments being received against invoices that never converted to an open state. In this case, the invoices were left in a draft state on Stripe’s side. And who could’ve expected that they’d need to occasionally check for draft invoices? It seems like it wasn’t made clear…

This sounds like something good old fashioned double-entry bookkeeping would have caught immediately (hunky dory income from Stripe seemingly falling into a black hole). No need to scrutinize every transaction until you notice the ledger isn't adding up.

Depending on the process, maybe. I don’t know the landscape of accounting integrations with Stripe, but I probably wouldn’t want to sync a Stripe draft invoice as an open invoice to my accounting app. If there’s no open invoice, there’s no reference in the GL, and there’s nothing to be caught apart from an informal ‘cash flow seems to have taken a hit’.

It’d take both an open invoice and running an A/R aging to catch this one, which isn’t implicit in double-entry accounting.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#68

Post by edwinwee »

asrossbach wrote: post #65
stagger87 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making some huge hand wavy statements based on this single anecdote...

As someone who has used Stripe over the past 5 years for large scale e-commerce and marketplace startups Stripe has dropped the ball quite significantly over the past two or so years. Their customer support has gotten worst, their communication to customers has faltered quite a bit and they're starting to nickel and dime their customers for basic features (like support that responds within a day or two). I wouldn't g…

We send satisfation surveys after support interactions, and consistently over the past year, 8+ out of 10 businesses have rated their interactions highly.

But it does sound like we did drop the ball with you, and I'd like to figure out what happened if you could forward me an example at edwin@stripe.com.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#69

Post by astura »

chrissnell wrote: post #41

My dad owns a successful chain of bicycle stores in Texas. He’s been in business for almost 51 years and he’s one of the largest bike dealers by volume in the country. He has nearly a hundred employees and a bookkeeper. Despite having a proverbial dozen balls in the air at any time and despite having people on the payroll to do bookkeeping, he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, a…

How does he catch credit card fraud? What does it look like?

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#70

Post by websap »

I actually thought Stripe did decently here, there were periods of silence which sucks. It's odd that you feel they are obligated to explain their internal processes with you?

Things they did right: 1. Immediately acknowledge the issue and raise it to a Specialist. 2. Give you a work-around, so that you don't need to be blocked. 3. Engage the lead PM, to speak to you, to address your concerns. 4. Fix the documentation first, so others know how to fix this and understand the cases. 5. Take feedback that they need to improve the API. 6. Find which customers had an issue and pro-actively reach out to them. (Isn't this what you wanted in the 1st place?)

Things that didn't go well: 1. Long periods of silence between mails. 2. Lack of a bug bounty, sounds like a pretty big miss on their part and a bug bounty would be nice.

Post reply on HN