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My Stripe Tax Story

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Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#71

Post by floodyberry- »

kevinpet wrote: post #44

That sequence of events is exactly what I'd expect for a "we screwed up, but not in a way to incur any legal liability" 1. Generic answer that "yep, it's not working, here's how to fix it" 2. Updating documentation to make it better. 3. Somebody saying "what should we do about all the other customers in the same situation? can we just shut up about it?" leading to the last email. And then... yeah, you can't directly…

> And then... yeah, you can't directly apologize and take responsibility because that would cost you a fortune

The system is truly working when you can just play dumb and rest easy knowing everyone you screwed is too poor to do anything about the situation in court

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#72

Post by pottertheotter »

aaxe wrote: post #55
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…

> he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, and reviews sales and receipts Sorry, what? How is this OK or even normalized - he should not have to check every single receipt every night. You hire people to do that, and if they cannot do it right, you hire someone else. As OP mentioned, it wasn't a gradual thing, and when you have a lot of customers, it can easily slip through. Even yo…

Yeah, this is nuts. Sounds like he has no internal controls, except for going over everything each night. But that’s not a very smart nor efficient way to go about it.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#73

Post by chrissnell »

aaxe wrote: post #55
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…

> he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, and reviews sales and receipts Sorry, what? How is this OK or even normalized - he should not have to check every single receipt every night. You hire people to do that, and if they cannot do it right, you hire someone else. As OP mentioned, it wasn't a gradual thing, and when you have a lot of customers, it can easily slip through. Even yo…

My dad is not next to me to reply, but your rebuttal patterns a conversation that he and I had many times over the years, when I was first getting my start in business and tried to tell him he was too old fashioned in his business methods. The bottom line is that you absolutely have to be involved in all levels of your business if you want to be successful and don’t want to be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t trust your folks. In fact, he’ll be the first to tell you that you have to trust your people. But, bottom line, you can’t outsource this level of care and attention to detail; you must be involved and you must be constantly on the lookout.

It sounds like a lot of work but over the course of many years running the same business, you develop a sixth sense for problems and can quickly scan a spreadsheet of receipts and spot issues. There are dozens of other “versions” of the late-night ERP scan. He can do the same thing walking across a showroom floor or taking one of the company’s Sprinter vans out for a drive.

It’s a way of life for him. He lives for his business and still works seven days a week at age 74. His business is exceptionally well-run and has been recognized nationally for it.

https://www.mysanantonio.com/sa-inc/article/SAInc-Flux-Bike-...

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#74

Post by Dwolb »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #49
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…

> if you let this kind of fuck-up go undetected for over three months, you have to at least assume some of the blame and acknowledge that you probably could have caught it if you scrutinized transactions. I work in eCommerce and occasionally there will be something like a script or config gets messed up and an issue with billing will happen. And being the "expert" I'm usually the one called to fix it. I wish I could…

This tells me we have a long way to go to increase business intelligence literacy in companies.

Not sure a ton realize that data is now a core piece of their operations.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#75

Post by mocheeze »

astura wrote: post #69
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?

I was about to reply to you, then I realized I was typing out a guide on how to commit credit card fraud. Not this time! ;)

(I worked for 6 years in that side of the industry. Particularly when it might apply to point of sale software.)

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#76

Post by NorwegianDude »

Upcoming problem: > Canada is the only jurisdiction I run my business, and therefore only need to charge tax to Canadian customers

Where your business is located doesn't necessarily mean anything. The location of the customer is what usually matters. You'll most likely have to register in quite a few places and keep up with tax reporting, payments, and rules everywhere you're registered.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#77

Post by harrisonjackson »

Having shipped a non-zero # of billing bugs with the Stripe API...

One of the best things you can do is catch all their webhooks, handle the ones you expect to receive, and raise a serious alarm for ANY others. Then prioritize properly handling those unknown alarms and setup your own notification/escalation system as needed for the important ones.

If you are short on dev hours, then use something like Zapier to catch the webhooks for you and forward critical ones to you in a way you will acknowledge. This strategy doesn't work as well with NEW webhooks so you'll still need to do the first option at some point.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#78

Post by [deleted] »

gelatocar wrote: post #58
edwinwee wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and we can dig a bit more into this?

Hi Edwin, I appreciate you offering. I did message support about this but it pretty quickly hit the limit of the time I was willing to put in to try and retrieve the money we lost (which wasn't all that much). It is one of those things where the way Stripe charges is technically correct as you need to calculate tax for all transactions even if they aren't fulfilled. But the odd behavior of trying to charge at end of…

[deleted]

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#79

Post by chipotle_coyote »

aaxe wrote: post #55
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…

> he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, and reviews sales and receipts Sorry, what? How is this OK or even normalized - he should not have to check every single receipt every night. You hire people to do that, and if they cannot do it right, you hire someone else. As OP mentioned, it wasn't a gradual thing, and when you have a lot of customers, it can easily slip through. Even yo…

While I'm pretty sensitive to "victim-blaming" and feel for the fellow involved here, and there's certainly some evidence that Stripe may have shipped an under-tested product, I would argue that the distance between

> Every good business owner does it

and

> Every good business owner gets someone to take care of it

is…maybe not really that large? Both amount to "every good business owner ensures that receipts are checked daily," and that clearly wasn't happening here.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#80

Post by floodyberry- »

chrissnell wrote: post #46
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…

One more thing to add to this: scrutinizing transactions isn’t just for catching bad stuff. It’s also a way to spot the good. For my dad, it’s a way to spot up-and-coming salespeople who are punching above their weight, for noticing high-dollar sales to repeat customers and making sure that those folks are well cared-for. It also tells him what bikes are selling well and helps him make strategic decisions for buying.…

Poring over individual transactions sounds like a terrible, if not impossible, way to identify aggregate trends
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