Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

Just do what eBay does and just charge sales tax on everything!

I am so fucking exhausted with the content marketing on Hacker News. It’s not that it has no value. It’s not that there isn’t a place for ‘developer evangelists’. It’s not about this piece. I’m just sick of it.

I come here for a refuge from manipulation- a place where people can share and debate things on their own merits. Content marketing is a not-so-sly way to insert one’s business interests into these types of conversations I enjoy for the purposes of driving metrics, sales, and series A’s.

I hear that taxation and billing and collection are complex. Try to implement WA State destination based sales tax for digital only goods. Where is the relevant tax district? It doesn’t align with zip codes or congressional districts. Municipalities move and reshape the landscape like rivers do. Is a billing address representative of the location of the purchasing party for tax purposes? We took this to a tax judge in 2014, and their final response was ‘do your best’.

I would love to read a blog post with such a war story- about parsing the tax rate soap API into a relational database that can not slow down a checkout page. About how time zones affect rate calculations. Where rate file updates accidentally modified past transactions and how to model data to prevent that. I don’t want to hear something is hard so you should buy my services. Not here. Not on a call to my cell phone. Not ever.

Business leaders need to determine which complexity they want to their developers to tackle- what is the most valuable for profit growth and risk mitigation. If the audience is business leaders, appeal to them directly, and take it somewhere else. If it’s to appeal to software developers, it shouldn’t be attached to ulterior motives. We see through it and we resent it. To the extent that we have influence over purchasing decisions, I’m likely to punish companies who regularly engage in this behavior.

Content marketing is different than creating useful content as a marketing strategy. I’ll raise Digital Ocean as an example. Their sysadmin content is top notch, and I’m happy to give them business for it out of gratitude. That is my decision. Nobody is trying to convince me of how to invest my or my company’s resources.

We get it. Auth is hard. SMS is hard. Billing is hard. None of it is core to most companies core business. If you really want to make your point, show me some code to prove it. Or spend your content budget on something that helps people. Just don’t think you’re going to win me over with a sales piece on HN. You’re not. I’ve already forgotten your name, and if it does come up I’ll have nothing but a negative memory to recall.

Sorry not sorry.

similar. worked on invoice app having to apply tax, and working with existing foxpro(?) tables that were in postgresql. Trying to reverse engineer without having access to original code, and make things work "like they used to". Someone manually pulled down some free tax thing once per month, but there were so many exceptions that people knew about that were just hardcoded in to the code that I had no access to that I could never make it "just work".

We transitioned to using an external tool (taxjar, IIRC, but might have been something else). Was a pain to feed them data to get back tax data, and.. so many exceptions and exemptions I had to learn about. Weeks later I get "all these numbers are wrong".

I dug in and went through logs.

"no, these are right. taxjar is adding x% on ABC and shipping".

"We don't charge tax on shipping".

"Well, taxjar is doing it, because it's how you're supposed to do it in this state".

"We've never charged tax on shipping"

"Well... you've probably been non-compliant for years then".

I think when they'd started 'computerizing' this back in the early 90s, shipping costs weren't taxed. Or... (IIRC) the amount of shipping cost taxed was proportional to the amount of taxable goods being shipped in the state (vs out of the state) and when they started, what they were shipping wasn't mostly taxable (like... some of the main items were taxable, but the supplies weren't, or something similar). And... if they were shipping to a non-taxable entity (non-profit) then the in-state shipping charge wasn't taxable, but they were supposed to pro-rate it based on the proportional distance in the target state, if that state charged tax on shipping, then track that and remit to that appropriate county/state authority.

These were some of the rules that a variety of people had tried to describe to me both what they thought was supposed to happen and what they thought the original software was doing, but... they could never find 2 examples to line up to confirm or justify those explanations.

Another example: certain items (chemicals) were taxable in some counties and not others, and might be taxed differently based on whether they were being 'used' by technicians vs delivered to a customer (again, different counties had different rules - and some of these rules were indeed confirmed by digging through taxjar and their support and state agency websites).

When this company started, it was one location in two counties in one state, and as they grew, the specifics grew (and also changed yearly) and what they should do became lost to everyone.

Moving things to an external hosted tax-as-a-service system was supposed to 'simplify' things, but it just introduced a lot of turmoil and headache, because routine numbers people were used to for years were suddenly replaced with "new" numbers which no one trusted.

> When someone in sales issues an invoice with a negative amount

I worked briefly with a tax-saas, and to handle refunds I just... did a negative amount. It worked! Except.... I hadn't looked closely. Their API removed the negative. A charge of -$7.92 was just a charge of $7.92. Their docs indicated "we don't accept negative numbers - use a refund transaction instead" but... the API accepted the negative number, then changed it to a positive, and kept running. No error code returned. Really really poor experience, and I hope they've fixed that.

What makes you think that this is being facetious?

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f... has a good overview of how companies that provide software for calculating taxes guarantee a market for their products by keeping the process of calculating taxes more complicated than it needs to be.