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

121–130 of 299 posts

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#121

Post by scrollaway »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #115
scrollaway wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working in fintech since 2014, and in tech since 2004. Whether Stripe's price is worth it is subjective, but something that is absolute fact is that whatever you've built doesn't compare. I can tell you that with absolute certainty, even without having seen any of what you've built. Consider this. Consider that you don't understand why what you perceive as the added value from Stripe Billing "isn't justifie…

I appreciate you writing this out in full — and my original post asked to be educated on this… However, I still don’t see the specifications difference in the checkouts (self hosted pages, pdfs, fraud protection) and Invoicing (reminder emails, retry payments, and end of service notifications, etc) - save the repeated nature of the subscription and if a stretch for you the subscription management / trials. I’m saying…

Your perception is correct, a lot of Stripe’s service is included in the base 2.9.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#122

Post by Retric »

Fr3dd1 wrote: post #110
throwaway2016a wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well, I am sorry but in my eyes this just shows bad product quality, bad transparance and missing understanding of basic business stuff on the side of the product. The only reason for software to be existing is to NOT mandate users to check stuff manually.

Users should be doing sanity checks of financial transactions on a regular basis. You even want an external party doing audits as frequently as is reasonable.

That doesn’t mean every transaction needs to be manually revived, but major outliers and a random sampling is a good idea.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#123

Post by maxwelldone »

Aeolun wrote: post #94
gelatocar wrote: post #33

I also had issues with stripe's automatic tax. We use stripe's subscriptions with free trials but don't collect credit card details up front, preferring to make sign up simple and low friction. Automatic tax is charged at 0.5% of each transaction, and apparently a trial ending is considered a transaction even if the user has no payment method, so we were hit with automatic tax fees for every trial end even if we rece…

> I discovered in actually using them has made me realize how much effort they put in to marketing to developers I think the problem is. When I used them like 5-6 years ago, their offering was absolutely legendary. So much so that I happily moved over from 1.5% fees on Authorize to 3% on Stripe. Right now? It’s basically become everything it seemed to be fighting against in the past.

What's a good alternative these days? Especially in NA.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#124

Post by lostlogin »

jv22222 wrote: post #120
chrissnell wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Your dad seems awesome, what a great role model. > you absolutely have to be involved in all levels of your business if you want to be successful But it does sound like your dad is a very effective delegator and has given a lot of autonomy to people in the business - a skill you definitely need to be highly sucessfull in business. So, maybe... stay involved at all levels, then find people who are good at a role (that…

> maybe the receipt checking part could have gone that route, but there was never any one who was right for a role like that in the business?

It would be interesting to learn what his red flags are (for errors and fraud), what his markers for attention are (good customers and staff).

I wonder if some of this could be scripted or otherwise encoded. At a minimum it might help him out.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#126

Post by scott_w »

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.

I don’t think it would. All the invoices were left in a Draft state, so I don’t think that appears on your ledger. You’d have to look at your list of Draft invoices to see it going up and up.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#127

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #92
whatshisface wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't normally have to give Stripe location information for US customers. The problem happened when he enabled tax support for Canadians. Enabling tax support in Canada breaks US subscriptions... who knew. > I built out my Stripe Tax integration, made sure I had all the addresses I needed for my Canadian customers (Canada is the only jurisdiction I run my business, and therefore only need to charge tax to Canadia…

He didn't enable "Stripe Tax for Canada". He enabled Stripe Tax. The whole selling point of Stripe Tax is that it calculates tax for customers in every supported location. It needs customer location to function. He's supposed to charge tax in other locations where it's required too. Using Stripe Tax to only handle tax for customers in the home region of the company when the company also sells outside the home region…

Who wants to be a global hallway monitor for taxes? It makes more sense to pay for a tool that makes you compliant with the applicable tax laws, and forget about the rest.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#128

Post by janci »

Yes, the documentation was lacking, the consequences were unexpected, the API design was not great to prevent this and the dashboard did not show the problem. They are all Stripe's faults.

But enabling an auto-magic feature for a business-critical operation (invoicing and taxes) and not even checking if it worked? Sorry to say that but it is utterly irresponsible. Heck, even the invoice numbers must not have matched. And the draft invoices piling up for months must have been visible too.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#129

Post by eps »

websap wrote: post #70

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 documentatio…

They also said "You are very welcome" and "Let me go ahead and dig into this for you" more than once.

So, yeah, it's absolutely nor clear why the heck the OP is so upset?

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#130

Post by andy_ppp »

maxwelldone wrote: post #123
Aeolun wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I discovered in actually using them has made me realize how much effort they put in to marketing to developers I think the problem is. When I used them like 5-6 years ago, their offering was absolutely legendary. So much so that I happily moved over from 1.5% fees on Authorize to 3% on Stripe. Right now? It’s basically become everything it seemed to be fighting against in the past.

What's a good alternative these days? Especially in NA.

Adyen seems to be a fair bit cheaper, no idea about if they are good or not
Post reply on HN