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My Stripe Tax Story

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Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#191

Post by emj »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #173

The fact that it took the writer three months (!) to spot this problem sets up a situation (IMO) in which swearing for effect in a chat session is out of the question. It's partly on him. Anything to do with money and tax internationally is complex, and it should be monitored at least until you know it works, e.g. put dates in your diary to check your first international customers paid the right tax? I must say, the…

If they do not have time acceleration I think it's clear that the fault lays with Stripe and their bad testing practices. I thought people paid Stripe to handle the "get money from humans" problem, that is a pretty broad problem though so Ig guess not. Considering it took Stripe, and lets be generous, 7 months to figure this out they obviously have problems with testing.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#192

Post by aetherspawn »

I used to use Stripe to process payments. One day someone bought a huge item with a stolen card.

Stripe sent me an email saying the payment had been “processed”, so I gave them the $3000 item. I later logged in and noticed “processed” meant “processing”, and the stolen card bounced at the bank a week later. They refused to take responsibility for sending me an email that clearly said the payment had been fully processed when it in fact had not been, allowing the item to be stolen.

Stripe support mocked me. They refused to cover the money and I never used them again. The only redeeming factor was it logged their IP address in the card logs, so I gave it to the police and they caught someone who had stolen hundreds of other items (but still no recuperation of lost funds for me).

I only use PayPal now. Never had an issue with PayPal, and they have always fully insured all transfers. No confusing transaction states that offload responsibility as a payment processor. None of this “we take a huge cut, but actually grant you no protection” garbage.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#193

Post by newaccount74 »

dhruvkar wrote: post #83
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…

Similar situation as OP. My dad started the business (his 3rd overall) 22 years ago and it's been growing steadily since. My dad still does daily scans of our ERP. I run the business with him and we have 40 employees, and I too have had similar conversations with him. While I'm sure there is a better way to do this (e.g. invest in BI, hire and train a person to do this etc.), the fact of the matter is no one else is…

> no one else is as invested in your business as you

This is so important, and I think it's what differentiates small owner operated businesses from multinationals and chains.

Your employees are not going to idly look through logs to see if everything is running smoothly when they are done with their tasks, they'll just go home and call it a day.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#194

Post by newaccount74 »

thathndude wrote: post #136
dhruvkar wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar situation as OP. My dad started the business (his 3rd overall) 22 years ago and it's been growing steadily since. My dad still does daily scans of our ERP. I run the business with him and we have 40 employees, and I too have had similar conversations with him. While I'm sure there is a better way to do this (e.g. invest in BI, hire and train a person to do this etc.), the fact of the matter is no one else is…

I think your mentality is right (as a small business owner myself). However, to push back a bit, I think sometimes it’s easy to believe that we’re the only ones who can do something because we’re the only ones who have lived and breathe it for 5+ (Pick your number) years. And one might be surprised if they actually tried outsourcing how competent some folks can be.

Can you share what kind of tasks you've successfully outsourced? In my experience it was very hard to outsource task with a vague definition like "look for things that aren't running smoothly".

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#195

Post by emj »

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…

Not AI, just statistics and double checks. In the old days that was done by people that knew what they were doing now it's a job for programmers. Having alerts about too many strange entries in the transaction log/inventory is something I've implemented.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#196

Post by unfocussed_mike »

emj wrote: post #191
unfocussed_mike wrote: post #173

The fact that it took the writer three months (!) to spot this problem sets up a situation (IMO) in which swearing for effect in a chat session is out of the question. It's partly on him. Anything to do with money and tax internationally is complex, and it should be monitored at least until you know it works, e.g. put dates in your diary to check your first international customers paid the right tax? I must say, the…

If they do not have time acceleration I think it's clear that the fault lays with Stripe and their bad testing practices. I thought people paid Stripe to handle the "get money from humans" problem, that is a pretty broad problem though so Ig guess not. Considering it took Stripe, and lets be generous, 7 months to figure this out they obviously have problems with testing.

I don't know how you can say any of this with the certainty you're conveying here. It seems wholly unwarranted.

For the most part you test your app in development the way you test any app that uses a third-party API service: by carefully reading the documentation, faking/stubbing responses and triggering your own webhooks with example data (which you can do from their devtools).

So beyond that, a sandbox that does everything the same way the live environment does except actually move money is actually the right kind of sandbox.

There are some narrow situations in Stripe Connect testing where it would be really nice to be able to tell Stripe to count days as minutes, though it does seem to ignore initial delay_days delays which is the most important one.

An official stateful Stripe mock with Connect support and webhook triggering would be useful (localstripe is excellent but lacks this).

But you shouldn't dive into Stripe Connect without knowing that it gets complex if you're deploying it globally, and I dare say the same applies to automatic taxation across different jurisdictions. You're going to need to know how to test this.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#197

Post by aaxe »

newaccount74 wrote: post #193
dhruvkar wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar situation as OP. My dad started the business (his 3rd overall) 22 years ago and it's been growing steadily since. My dad still does daily scans of our ERP. I run the business with him and we have 40 employees, and I too have had similar conversations with him. While I'm sure there is a better way to do this (e.g. invest in BI, hire and train a person to do this etc.), the fact of the matter is no one else is…

> no one else is as invested in your business as you This is so important, and I think it's what differentiates small owner operated businesses from multinationals and chains. Your employees are not going to idly look through logs to see if everything is running smoothly when they are done with their tasks, they'll just go home and call it a day.

> Your employees are not going to idly look through logs to see if everything is running smoothly when they are done with their tasks

Because that's a job!

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#198

Post by cushychicken »

chrissnell wrote: post #89
floodyberry- wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You’re absolutely right and to be clear, my dad also pours over data roll-ups, charts, etc., but he’s never stopped looking at receipts. It’s a habit he’s had since the 70s. Back in the day, he used these electro-mechanical cash registers that had very loud typewriter-like receipt printers. At the end of the day, the manager would run the journal and my dad—-in his office across the store—tell you what kind of a sale…

There's a persistent meme on HN that it's straightforward to make a business that "runs on autopilot", with no human intervention. I'll admit that such a business is possible, but I'm deeply skeptical of the durability of such a business.

I'd much rather bet on a business owner like your dad, who's deeply involved. Sounds like your dad's receipt reading was a great habit to have, and paid dividends far outside of just "making sure things were running OK on a daily basis".

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#199

Post by candiddevmike »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #190

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…

Which one do you use?

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#200

Post by danpalmer »

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…

Your Dad has 100 employees to delegate to, and therefore has time to go into detail on the things that matter to him, in this case sales and receipts.

This guy is working alone and likely has less time to go into detail like that.

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