241–250 of 299 posts
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…
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…
Not good. Can you email me those details at edwin@stripe.com and we can look into what went wrong?
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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.
That's not fully true. There is also a contingent of people who like to use the the tax code as a mechanism of policy apart from efficient collection of revenue. 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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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'…
To a point, yes. I mean, bikes have changed a ton in 51 years and I guarantee you my dad would struggle to work on the newfangled high end high tech stuff, nor would he be the guy that you'd want to professionally fit you to your new road bike. He's got people on the payroll who do that, for sure. Bookkeeping is different, though. He's actually been defrauded by a bookkeeper in the early 1980s. I don't know the detai…
I think that's it really - you need to have checks and balances on all things (including yourself imo as the boss).
Personally I would not want to be double-checking receipts every day (and with 100 employees, the volume is likely significant), but if he enjoys it, that's all that matters eh!
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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.
You can streamline the process and at the same time turn it into a single bill that would be much more shocking to tax payers than the current situation where they often get either a refund or a small bill.
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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 jus…
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
When I reached out to support, I also felt insulted and like I was begging my cable company to refund the $5 they owed me. They refused to acknowledge that their product is broken or take any blame.
I'm honestly just waiting for a good Stripe alternative to pop up so they can't get away with these product issues and bad customer support policies so easily.
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…