221–230 of 299 posts
Stripe is just awful. I have no experience from the vendor side, but as a customer, I've noticed that they seem to associate a credit card number with an email address. My business credit card is associated with dozens of different email addresses, but Stripe wants to use the one associated with my most recent purchase regardless of what email I provide to them. I get emails coming in to random (but valid) email addr…
There is a massive chasm between Stripe's perceived (for a lack of a better term) awesomeness vs the actual reality. I don't think I have ever had an actual good experience with Stripe Here is a couple of examples - The account manager assigned to us was absolutely horrible. Would not answer emails. Getting information out of him was like pulling water from stone. And our business is a global company with annual reve…
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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.
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The existence of software does not abolish your audit & compliance responsibilities.
The existence of audit & compliance responsibilities does not abolish the responsibility of the software to reduce foot-guns. The number of people here arguing the opposite is completely insane.
As for why they're inevitable, the context is that most enterprise software is off-the-shelf and serves many markets, so configuration becomes the point of weakness. Only bespoke software written for a very narrow sector, or tailored to serve a single business, can really hope to do better.
We might hope things were different, but they're not, and as long as software continues to be developed by the humans, it's likely to remain that way.
None of this is meant to absolve Stripe, however, since in this particular instance they rather appear to have contributed to the fuckup by omitting a key element of auditability, viz. the clear reporting of exceptions.
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I have enough experience with local and federal government that there is no way I want them to build any kind of software. Much less a complicated tax software. It might work in the EU but in the US there’s state/county/municipality taxes that can get quite complicate. My zip code has a small area in my county and my county is at a 6% tax rate. Most of the zip code is another county that has a %7.5 tax rate. I have t…
If the tax law is so complex that the government can't correctly implement tax software, how is the government going to collect the taxes?
I suppose that would be like asking the EU commission to provide tax software for all its member states.
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> 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.
Tax credits for education, clean energy, penalties, small businesses, mortage interest, each one of those one-off changes adds complexity, and in total ultimately can make the process dramatically more difficult.
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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 only reason for software to be existing is to NOT mandate users to check stuff manually. Software exists so users don't have to do stuff manually. But people should absolutely check on things periodically. That doesn't mean it's always necessary to check every single transaction, but spot and sanity checking is mandatory diligence, IMO. I pay my CPA to do my taxes so I don't have to do them myself, but of cours…
Is it more than 0?
Is it more than yesterday?
Seems like 2 or 3 dead simple controls on his part could have avoided this.
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> 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…
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…
In the US, jurisdictional/funding issues are the biggest blocker. There is no federal sales tax, so the IRS can't use its budget to pay for this. State agencies are not going to be able to use their funds to pay developers to add functionality for a different jurisdiction, and ditto for counties/cities/special districts, which tend to have much smaller budgets anyways.
The best avenue would probably be something like ITOR (the funds that give USDS its wide remit to help any gov agency with their tech needs), but states and localities aren't always open to receiving this kind of help. (It did happen with unemployment programs during the pandemic, but the lawyers had to lawyer pretty hard to make that possible.)
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…
This is just another variant of "cloud first" mentality, assuming that cloud service providers are actually going to be better than you (as opposed to just cheaper) in carrying out these tasks.
The companies I've worked for put enhanced auditing and reporting in place before this sort of thing went live to make sure it was working right.
Still, the post is equally a massive self-own. In what business can you be so lax about cash flow, the most important business metric ever, as to concluding that it "feels" off after some 3 months and then think it will somehow even out over time? And only because you were alerted by a customer?
What would happen without that customer? A few more months of tanking financials before you wake up?
I must be a dinosaur to believe that order intake/management, invoices, tax and payments is something you're absolutely on top of, on a daily basis. It's the very core of every business. Either you do it or your accountant does it.
It doesn't matter if you use Stripe or a piece of paper, this is a thing to be on top of. Did I get paid is the #1 business question, nothing else matter in comparison.
Further, OP implemented a tax module, didn't bother to read the migration guide, and tested nothing. Same problem: an unmanaged business. You should not miss 3 months worth of draft invoices.
Still, we all make mistakes, Stripe could definitely have done better as well, so some irrational anger is understandable. Yet I find it very sour how some poor support team is hung out to dry.
Disclosing all of this in this amount of needless detail is close to doxing. Next, it is shared far and wide after which many people can pile on to the team. I find that disproportional and in poor taste. You can tell how even when the problem is clear and some acknowledgement is given, it's not enough. It's as if OP want theirs heads. Revenge.
Don't humiliate support teams. If you want compensation, be clear about what you want exactly. They aren't going to rectify you with a full page ad in the NY Times.