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Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

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Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#11

Post by trollied »

spchampion2 wrote: post #5

Just wait until you meet billing's angry roommate: invoicing. In the US, an invoice is just a weird PDF that you might glance at before sending off to your accounts payable team. But in other countries, especially those that use VAT style taxing systems, an invoice can be a legal document that expresses costs and taxes in a legally prescribed way for accounting purposes. Many countries have prescriptive rules over ho…

Yup, it's a nightmare. Invoices needing to be in specific number sequences. Any corrections need to be dealt with by reissuing a special "corrective invoice". Don't even get me started on geocoding for taxes. Urgh. Also, when you've got the invoicing right, you've got to work out how to do the feeds to the accounting systems so that it all posts to the right place.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#12

Post by lelandbatey »

Billing is a nightmare, and if I had one piece of advice for people building a pay-for-what-you-use system like most SaaS, it's this:

DO NOT bill against your business logic entities. They change, and doing a COUNT at the end of the month won't catch all things which changed or which cost you money during the month. Instead, figure out what you bill for and and when you do that thing, record a row in a DB or into a steam of that "billable event".

Reconciling billable events is much easier to do, and it's tolerant of all the weird edge cases (such as a support person hard deleting data when they should soft delete, which would otherwise throw off your end of month counts).

There's a reason AWS (in general) can produce a log of everything you did which cost you money. It's painful, but it's less painful than the alternative.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#13

Post by api »

Any kind of business or accounting system tends to be an endless long tail of "can the invoicing system send the invoice in Esperanto using only 16-bit Unicode characters on Tuesdays but only while it is raining and only for customers whose last names end with E and who signed up more than one year ago according to the Chinese calendar?" type features.

That's why attempts at "no-code" systems where biz/accounting people can design their own system are a perennial fad, but as these systems are developed they always just end up evolving into weird domain specific programming languages.

It's also why any sufficiently large company ends up implementing their own in-house accounting system and/or customizing some byzantine monstrosity like SAP which is really just another way of implementing your own.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#15

Post by bombcar »

spchampion2 wrote: post #5

Just wait until you meet billing's angry roommate: invoicing. In the US, an invoice is just a weird PDF that you might glance at before sending off to your accounts payable team. But in other countries, especially those that use VAT style taxing systems, an invoice can be a legal document that expresses costs and taxes in a legally prescribed way for accounting purposes. Many countries have prescriptive rules over ho…

And even worse - your biggest customers won't even smell your invoice unless you enter it line by line into some ancient SAP system developed 20 years ago, where everything cloud related is classified as telephony except storage space which must be classified as filing cabinets (movable) or your invoice will be (very slowly) rejected.

And if it is rejected you have to enter it all again by hand; editing isn't a feature.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#16

Post by londons_explore »

Random idea:

Don't build a billing system. Or at least not a precise one.

Have a price list as normal, but just guestimate the user's bills based on any easily accessible information. Eg. For a hosting company I might just count how many VM's they have active when the billing script runs . If the user isn't happy with the total, give them a button to correct the total and pay that.

Spot check what the user's pay, and warn then ban any users which are clearly deliberately paying substantially less than list price for your services.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#17

Post by bombcar »

lelandbatey wrote: post #12

Billing is a nightmare, and if I had one piece of advice for people building a pay-for-what-you-use system like most SaaS, it's this: DO NOT bill against your business logic entities. They change, and doing a COUNT at the end of the month won't catch all things which changed or which cost you money during the month. Instead, figure out what you bill for and and when you do that thing, record a row in a DB or into a s…

And depending on how you do it, it's not as hard as it sounds - for example, the first minute of "cloud server V1" can get a row in the db, and each "period" that row gets updated with the current minutes.

Or you can log them into tables that get processed into other invoice tables.

This also lets you keep grandfathered customers around as long as you want.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#19

Post by aerovistae »

> To solve this problem at scale, we adopted a radical sharing approach. We’ve started building an Open-Source Alternative to Stripe Billing (and Chargebee, and all the equivalents).

This is so great. I personally haven't had to deal with this problem, but I've worked at a number of organizations (and heard about many others!) where this sort of business logic had to be implemented. It's just reinventing the wheel. I shudder to think how many companies have implemented a system for managing recurring subscriptions.

We have things like Ruby-on-Rails, Django, Laravel, and many others to take the bite out of building web applications. They keep us from having to reinvent the wheel.

We need similar open source frameworks for common business use-cases - billing, subscriptions, order/purchase management, and so on.

Sometimes it's weird to remember we're in the stone age of technology - all of this is a few decades old at most, and even early predecessors don't go back more than 70 years. Human history goes back tens of thousands of years. There's so much yet to come.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#20

Post by Rafsark »

spchampion2 wrote: post #5

Just wait until you meet billing's angry roommate: invoicing. In the US, an invoice is just a weird PDF that you might glance at before sending off to your accounts payable team. But in other countries, especially those that use VAT style taxing systems, an invoice can be a legal document that expresses costs and taxes in a legally prescribed way for accounting purposes. Many countries have prescriptive rules over ho…

Hi! We decided to aggregate all costs of a "billable period".

Imagine you bill your customers monthly (the billable period), all the charges (usage-based features + subscription) will appear as line items of a single invoice.

This enables you to gather all the fees of a period into a total invoice, but still be able to provide granularity to your customers (breakdown of all the fees to be paid).

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