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

181–190 of 299 posts

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#181

Post by aconsult1 »

chrissnell wrote: post #73
aaxe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

I concur. I also happen to run a business and although I employ almost a hundred people I have never let my eyes of the "tape". I trust my team and owe a great amount to them for helping run the business. But if they make a mistake that directly affects my bottom line, it's ultimately my fault.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#182

Post by kelnos »

lbriner wrote: post #157
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…

I think this is an unfair comparison. There is a big difference between checking the work of multiple employees who might type stuff in wrong or credit card fraud compared to OP who has a fully integrated billing system provided by a very large and well-funded company who have failed to get some real basics right. The MINIMUM most people would expect would be a notification either by email or on the dashboard to say…

Agreed that Stripe has some product & UX issues here, but if I'm going to make big changes to how my customers are billed and taxed, I'm going to very carefully watch the result of those changes for a while to make sure it's working properly. Seems like OP didn't do that, and that's pretty irresponsible, IMO.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#183

Post by inopinatus »

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.

The existence of software does not abolish your audit & compliance responsibilities.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#184

Post by kelnos »

HWR_14 wrote: post #64
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.

I would think that "money flowing into my bank account" would be a KPI. OP did seem to notice something was off there, but ignored it! Instead he decided to trust a dashboard that just told him "you revenue is growing, yay!" That seems foolish.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#185

Post by alistairSH »

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…

Not just the “TurboTax” lobby, but also a strong contingent of anti-tax conservatives. One of their approaches to gain sympathy to their cause is to keep making taxes hard. If taxes are hard, the general population will want less of them.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#186

Post by quantumduck »

kingcharles wrote: post #50
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.

I respect Stripe for responding in some way. When I had an issue with Square they just terminated my account and left me stranded, rather than fix their product.

If it took a trending Hacker news post for them to respond, yeah no they don't have my respect at all.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#187

Post by Fr3dd1 »

fvold wrote: post #146
Fr3dd1 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As it happens, I'm reading this thread while taking a break from writing tax handling in a piece of e-commerce software. It relies 100% on the settings of the application in question, because tax codes and procedures vary greatly around the world, and it's internationally used software. There are even some stores using this software that sell items to and from different countries using the same website, so it can be…

Everything you wrote is correct. But still, if your product does not transparently show and alert such events, overall product quality is in my opinion bad. Dev or lead or product manager should not be ok with this. But this pretty mich reflects current state of software development. Errors and stuff are in way too many cases "ok" to occure.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#188

Post by oefrha »

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…

Stripe Support did not engage the lead PM, OP happened to have the PM’s email:

> In the mean time, I had also been reaching out to, who best I can tell, was the product manager or product lead for Stripe Tax because I had her email address and contact information from previously discussing Stripe Tax with her.

Ironically the PM was a fair bit more responsive than Support.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#189

Post by aaxe »

chrissnell wrote: post #73
aaxe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Your dad sounds awesome.

If your dad loves the work, okay cool. But your effective implication is you cannot have anyone else do this, which is obviously absurd because there are companies much much larger than either of ours that pull it off.

The key point is not "the owner has to do it", it's someone has to be held responsible for this.

For smaller businesses, it's likely the owner. For someone like your dad's, it's usually someone else. Even a solid bookkeeping system would have picked up what OP missed.

> you develop a sixth sense for problems

100% agreed, but for the owner/operator it's usually all things, but for the person who is responsible, it's usually a lot more of the minutiae.

It's literally impossible to be the master of all things.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#190

Post by tut-urut-utut »

I don't understand why would anyone use Stripe Tax? At that price range, suddenly one can also switch to something like Paddle, Gumroad, FastSpring, MyCommerce or some other Merchant of Record.

The merchant of Record will then act as a middleman/reseller between your SaaS and a consumer, and will take full responsibility not only for calculating, but also collecting and filing taxes in any of the jurisdictions.

As a SaaS, all you get from MoR is one payment at a defined schedule. Any errors in tax calculation, reporting, filing are not your problem, it's their problem.

Stripe Tax costs the same as Merchant of Record, but it doesn't do anything they do. Yes, they help you calculate the tax amount, give you the summary, but it's you that still need to file taxes correctly everywhere in the world, and it's still you that is responsible for Stripe Tax mistakes.

Until Stripe can act as a full Merchant of Record, I don't see a reason to use them unless one sells only in one (home) country.

Post reply on HN