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My Stripe Tax Story

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Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#161

Post by klabb3 »

harrisonjackson wrote: post #77

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…

Thanks for the free documentation. (Companies should really be paying out "missing doc bounties".)

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#162

Post by klabb3 »

janci wrote: post #128

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.

I was wondering about this as well. Author seems to have checked several dashboards and metrics, yet still missed it. Feels like a clear UX bug if they didn't at least have a way to alert or monitor for drafts that are never sent, especially if they are recurring on the same accounts.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#164

Post by posguy »

rwky wrote: post #142

Things like this are why I do this internally and just use stripe and other payment providers for actually charging the customer. Granted it's a pain in the arse but you only need to set it up once and occasionally adjust the tax rates as they change. IMHO stripe has become far too complex and people are relying on them for a critical part of their products without a fallback. I've seen a few occurrences lately where…

Who are you using as a backup payment provider?

Have you been able to get Stripe to export your clients card data and ACH details to your backup processor?

Curious as I'd love to have automated payment provider redundancy and replication for recurring invoices.

https://stripe.com/docs/security/data-migrations/exports

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#165

Post by HWR_14 »

eru wrote: post #132
Chirael wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like a classic example of how accrual bookkeeping can be misleading due to timing issues (the sale has already been booked even though the cash hasn’t been collected). I know it has other advantages vs. cash bookkeeping, but cash is so much easier to understand that I have always chosen it whenever possible (i.e., for a service business).

If you have the data, either form of bookkeeping should be 'just' a shift in presentation? (I don't know whether the software used makes this easy?)

Yes, a lot of software can toggle between them via a trivial UI toggle

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#166

Post by graderjs »

wildmanx wrote: post #149
graderjs wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that, with the importance of tax to government revenue, why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use? Increases in collection efficiency have historically been associated with growth of the state coffers (and state's whose bureacracies failed to adequately capture tax had to resort to funding themselves in other ways, frequently…

> It's funny that, with the importance of tax to government revenue, why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use? Because there is a strong lobby that prevents it. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f... Money has too strong a foothold in American politics. (In other countries too, but especially in the land of the…

Ah yes I heard about this tax software lobby before. It's weird in this case since it's like "money fighting money" haha

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#167

Post by spoonjim »

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…

LOL did you miss the part where he said his dad has 100 employees and is one of the biggest bike dealers in the country? How successful is your company?

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#168

Post by graderjs »

refurb wrote: post #156
graderjs wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that, with the importance of tax to government revenue, why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use? Increases in collection efficiency have historically been associated with growth of the state coffers (and state's whose bureacracies failed to adequately capture tax had to resort to funding themselves in other ways, frequently…

Not sure how software is going to always find "...credit card fraud, internal theft, mis-priced items, mistakes....". I don't care how good AI in finding tumors in x-rays is, I still want a set of skilled eyes to confirm findings. It's the same reason I double check all my paychecks to make sure I'm paid the right amount and the deductions are correct. All of it's automated on the backend, but it's still my money and…

No I wasn't thinking it's a replacement, not 'directly' replying to the ancestor, just riffing on the idea. :)

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#170

Post by rkagerer »

I consider this a great example of why systems dealing with money should be carefully engineered with sufficient safeguards in place that even reckless kindergarteners could operate with reasonable confidence they can't shoot themselves in the foot.

This is not a field where you want complexity or cognitive overhead.

I've encountered some ugly code while consulting in the payments space and had to educate and advocate (sometimes less gently than that word conveys) with developers concepts like atomicity, rollback, instrumentation, reconciliation, monitoring, diagnosability, etc. even after their creations had misplaced literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's always easy to blame the user; a good developer/architect understands how their code/systems can fail and stays on the lookout for edge cases and potential gaps.

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