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My Stripe Tax Story

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Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#141

Post by Dragony »

Fr3dd1 wrote: post #110
throwaway2016a wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Generally speaking software makes things faster, not better. Good software for a bad process will simply expedite problems.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#142

Post by rwky »

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 bugs, random account blocks etc have taken Stripe payments offline and suddenly the revenue stream tanks.

Always have a backup payment provider!

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#143

Post by white_dragon88 »

chrissnell wrote: post #41

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…

[dead]

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#144

Post by eertami »

Aeolun wrote: post #98
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #82

I don't know how Stripe's dashboard looks/works, and whether it easily displays the number of invoices left in "draft" state. But when the author writes about the silent failure here, > No failed API calls (as far as I could tell). I can't help but wonder whether that "as far as I could tell" is carrying a lot more weight than it might first appear. Stripe's documentation under "Collect taxes for recurring payments"…

The goal of Stripe is to make things simple. I shouldn’t have to implement a webhook to discover that none of my invoices are actually being paid. I’d expect a notification email to be sent to the account until that is explicitly turned off.

If you're writing software, and you develop a new feature without testing the failure path, then I don't think it's possible to make any safe assumptions about what failure should or shouldn't do.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#145

Post by codeofdusk »

SilasX wrote: post #96
dhc02 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech support gaslighting. Perfect encapsulation of the phenomenon. Someone make an urban dictionary entry.

Interestingly enough, I vaguely remember a pg article about how Lisp was so effective he could deploy fixes during a customer support call about the issue, to the point the customer thought they had messed up instead of the application. I can’t seem to find that now, but this one is close (in praising Lisp’s speed advantage for startups): http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

> I can’t seem to find that now

Here you are: http://www.paulgraham.com/lwba.html

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#146

Post by fvold »

Fr3dd1 wrote: post #110
throwaway2016a wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

As it happens, I'm reading this thread while taking a break from writing tax handling in a piece of e-commerce software.

It relies 100% on the settings of the application in question, because tax codes and procedures vary greatly around the world, and it's internationally used software. There are even some stores using this software that sell items to and from different countries using the same website, so it can be set up to handle tax differently per product.

Not everything is taxed everywhere, so it will accept it without question if someone sets up a product with the tax class "none", and happily log, process and store an order with 0% tax.

Yes, it's a footgun for the inexperienced to be able to accidentally commit tax fraud, but no, the software can't just override the user input and insist that a 25% VAT should be applied to random things based on ... what? The name? A hunch? MaChInE LeArNiNg?

Manual audits are used to discover human error, be it my error in creating the software, or your error in the data supplied to the software. I can create the logs and make them as easy to read as possible, but if you don't read them for three months, that's on you.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#147

Post by mytailorisrich »

Payments, invoicing, tax, etc are hard because the logic is complex and many things can fail in many places.

Stripe has expanded by offering to take care of that for customers. That has two consequences: (1) obviously that means Stripe has to take care of the complexity with the added problem that each customer has a specific use-case and (2) customers must still make the effort to understand exactly how Stripe's system works and implement extensive checks and reports (That's always the case with payments but even more as you entrust more business logic to a third party).

Not taking (2) seriously will hit you. If you notice an issue because a customer actually took the time to contact you because they have not been charged in several months, it definitely means that you have not followed through on (2) at all.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#148

Post by bluelu »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #125

So user didn't read guide properly, then after turning on a new tax invoicing system didn't check that all customers were actually being invoiced for three months... Obviously Stripes fault. /s

Well, the user only wanted to be half tax compliant (in his home country only), and not collect any taxes in the other countries where he is legally obliged to collect them to.

Not sure how you can even start a business, sell stuff and not collect VAT right from the start. Here in Europe this is unthinkable.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#149

Post by wildmanx »

graderjs wrote: post #140
throwaway2016a wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 free.)

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#150

Post by wildmanx »

floodyberry- wrote: post #80
chrissnell wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One more thing to add to this: scrutinizing transactions isn’t just for catching bad stuff. It’s also a way to spot the good. For my dad, it’s a way to spot up-and-coming salespeople who are punching above their weight, for noticing high-dollar sales to repeat customers and making sure that those folks are well cared-for. It also tells him what bikes are selling well and helps him make strategic decisions for buying.…

Poring over individual transactions sounds like a terrible, if not impossible, way to identify aggregate trends

Most of the time, the brain does this better than any machine.

That's why we don't have self-driving cars yet.

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