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Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

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Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#111

Post by orf »

notch656a wrote: post #83
DocTomoe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That american exceptionalism approach will work with private citizen customers. With business customers, leaning back in the legal framework encouraging tax fraud will not fly. They just won't buy from you then. That's why any US company wanting to do business in Europe either has an European subsidiary, or follows something that's compatible with EU invoicing schemes.

>. With business customers, leaning back in the legal framework encouraging tax fraud will not fly. Yes which is why in nations like Portugal, where any business invoice may be subject to accountability to government, there totally isn't a massive informal (read: tax-evading) economy to deal with the fact that the government makes it literally impossible (at least in above words) to accept an invoice legal in the jur…

There isn’t a massive tax evasion economy in the USA?

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#112

Post by Aeolun »

dboreham wrote: post #108

Note OP makes a billing product (OSS, granted) so is motivated to characterize the field as complex and hard. In reality billing is just like many other processes humans engage in. For sure it's more complex than computing prime numbers, but hey try writing software to capture medical services processes :) In the end this is exactly what engineers are supposed to do: figure out ways to model/capture/represent complex…

If it’s as annoying as translating human processes into code, I can see how they’d want to standardize it so they’d never have to do that particular part again.

Then again, if you make it too customizable, you end up with current single sign on solutions.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#113

Post by logicalmonster »

cletus wrote: post #80

Pretty much everything is more complicated than people (including engineers) think. Take a simple example: selling clothing in a retail store. Sounds simple right? You have an inventory of items and someone pays for it. Should be a simple transaction, right? Well, now you're dealing with: - How do you determine the price? There might be a retail price but there are sales, discounts, overrides for various reasons (eg…

> As an aside, this is one reason why I'm so bearish on Web3 and smart contracts in general. The edge cases are so complex and possibly unknowable that codifying these, particularly on an immutable blockchain, to remove the need for human intervention seems doomed to failure.

I do think the potential for errors is currently real (people mess up simple wallet transfers all of the time) but it's reasonable to assume that big things and making them easy for normal people to use is going to take time.

It's easy to forget how ridiculously early into crypto humans still are. We're only about 14 years into the invention of crypto. We're only about 7 years since the release of Ethereum. The general public barely understands what crypto is other than having some conception of it as some kind of Internet money. Most people cannot discuss what a blockchain is, what smart contracts are, or why oracles are important. And forget the general public for a minute: even smart technical people on HN can barely give a good description of how all of these pieces work and fit together.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#114

Post by Rafsark »

trollied wrote: post #11
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.

Yep, fortunately in Europe we can issue credit notes, making our job easier. I do think giving the possibility to send charges information to a webhook is a great way to start: this data can be plugged to any invoicing system (or any tax, payment providers) who are trying to solve those things. The hardest part for me, when working in that fintech, was to build the whole logic to trigger the invoice, not so much the invoice itself. But this company was a EU company, probably easier to work with invoices

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#115

Post by PeterisP »

notch656a wrote: post #100
AnhTho_FR wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Anh-Tho, one of a co-founders of Lago. I'm French, and I confirm, in B2B, no invoice (that is compliant, not a mere receipt) -> no payment.

Thank you Anh-Tho for your response. What is the mechanism for French government to subpoena a non-EU business to find this invoice? If the customer (instead of vendor) produced an invoice that matched their bank statements and non-conforming receipt, hypothetically, would anyone really know the difference?

Probably they wouldn't as full audits aren't that common, but audits do happen and most accountants won't care about your purchase as much to personally commit a felony and forge documents for no good reason (accountants do have personal responsibility, and every accounting course reminds wannabe accountants that "the boss ordered it" is not an excuse) so they simply say that they can't/won't do it and if the vendor can't send a satisfactory invoice then they won't do business with that vendor.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#116

Post by giomasce »

dawkins wrote: post #61
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…

Invoicing gets even better in countries like Portugal, where you have to send to the tax authorities every invoice that you generate.

In Italy too. They specifically developed an XML format for that, and each time you issue an invoice you have to (well, with some exceptions, but they are gradually removing all of them) send a copy to the revenue agency, which will forward it to the recipient (and keep a copy).

While it is a bit inconvenient, though, I don't think it is a bad idea. I am pretty sure it helps a lot making the life harder for people evading taxes, and to some extent the availability of a standard machine-readable format makes it easy to do accounting. My wife sells videocourses online and I developed a thing that automatically issues invoices as soon as people buy a product (with some human supervision, mainly to avoid the machine doing havoc is some exceptional situation happens; normally it is just "click a button to send the invoice"). The invoices are then automatically available to the accountant for doing accountant things.

You can find the XSD here: https://www.fatturapa.gov.it/en/norme-e-regole/documentazion...

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#117

Post by Rafsark »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #58

I've had to deal with subscription based billing, and in my experience it wasn't a nightmare. There are some corner cases, but, those exist in every domain. And the stakes are definitely raised since you're dealing with people's money. Usage based billing sounds like a nightmare though. Taxes in the USA are a nightmare too. I have a friend that lives on a street, and for one side the tax rate is 7.5%, and the other s…

For simple subscription-based billing, it's somehow not this hard, you are right. It also depends on how much plans you provide to your customers, and you still need to scratch your head for upgrades and downgrades.

I truly believe in usage-based billing, so I do think pricing are getting more and more complex over time.

Taxes are a nightmare for everyone also (in Europe too...)

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#118

Post by epberry »

Usage based billing is not only hard to implement but hard to consume. No one really knows what they are spending and how much particular customers or products cost. I did a writeup a week ago on CDNs and ended up spending several hours in spreadsheets.

I had felt this pain vaguely before but actually seeing it everyday at my current job makes me realize there are engineers suffering on both sides of software billing.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#119

Post by PeterisP »

notch656a wrote: post #83
DocTomoe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That american exceptionalism approach will work with private citizen customers. With business customers, leaning back in the legal framework encouraging tax fraud will not fly. They just won't buy from you then. That's why any US company wanting to do business in Europe either has an European subsidiary, or follows something that's compatible with EU invoicing schemes.

>. With business customers, leaning back in the legal framework encouraging tax fraud will not fly. Yes which is why in nations like Portugal, where any business invoice may be subject to accountability to government, there totally isn't a massive informal (read: tax-evading) economy to deal with the fact that the government makes it literally impossible (at least in above words) to accept an invoice legal in the jur…

It's not literally impossible - the simple solution to standard invoice being unacceptable is to issue a different invoice that matches the requirements, and almost every vendor is happy to do so in order to make the sale.

Also, the informal tax-evading economy relies on personal contacts and 'mutual understanding' - it's not easily accessible to a foreign vendor, and when foreign vendors do want to access that economy, it requires much more adoption of local customs than just making a different format of invoice.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#120

Post by hobo_mark »

epberry wrote: post #118

Usage based billing is not only hard to implement but hard to consume. No one really knows what they are spending and how much particular customers or products cost. I did a writeup a week ago on CDNs and ended up spending several hours in spreadsheets. I had felt this pain vaguely before but actually seeing it everyday at my current job makes me realize there are engineers suffering on both sides of software billing…

Speaking of usage-based billing, if I intend to charge users a usage-based bill at the end of the month, as far as I have looked Stripe is the only provider that supports this (they call it "metered billing"), is there really no alternative?
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