Using GitHub Gist as a blog is such a cool idea that I might just do that.
My Stripe Tax Story
151–160 of 299 posts
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
> he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, and reviews sales and receipts Sorry, what? How is this OK or even normalized - he should not have to check every single receipt every night. You hire people to do that, and if they cannot do it right, you hire someone else. As OP mentioned, it wasn't a gradual thing, and when you have a lot of customers, it can easily slip through. Even yo…
Yeah, this is nuts. Sounds like he has no internal controls, except for going over everything each night. But that’s not a very smart nor efficient way to go about it.
If you compare that dad story to the SaaS story that this article is about, it's pretty clear whose strategy is more successful.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi Edwin, I appreciate you offering. I did message support about this but it pretty quickly hit the limit of the time I was willing to put in to try and retrieve the money we lost (which wasn't all that much). It is one of those things where the way Stripe charges is technically correct as you need to calculate tax for all transactions even if they aren't fulfilled. But the odd behavior of trying to charge at end of…
It'd be useful to take a closer look at your invoices, so let me know. The Stripe Tax fee is charged for the volume of the invoice—a trial invoice should have a volume of $0, so the Stripe Tax fee would not be charged. However, after the trial and when your customer starts paying, you'll have an invoice that's >$0—that's when the Stripe Tax fee would be charged. We talk about a bit about this in https://stripe.com/do…
Hey Edwin,
I appreciate your help in the past getting our business unblacklisted from Stripe in the past.
Stripe seems to be trying to move up the value chain, but problems like this tax calculation issue and the fear of Stripe deciding to brick the accounts of businesses keeps other businesses and worker owned co-ops in the industry I work in from considering Stripe.
Does Stripe plan to review and unban accounts of businesses that were solely banned for being in formerly undesirable or blacklisted categories?
Additionally, emails like the one below do spook me: Our data shows that 72% of your transactions in the past six months were recurring and you are not currently automating recurring payments. Stripe Billing can make it easier and faster for your customers to pay you on a recurring basis.
We use an off the shelf open source invoicing system to connect to Stripe, First Data, our local tax authority and the rest of our infrastructure, which is already automating the recurring billings for our clients without Stripe Billing.
I'm unclear what value Stripe has to add here besides putting all our eggs in one basket (risking potential lockout again), and these types of emails make it clear that Stripe is mining the subset of data you get from us and our clients, though the fact that we're reusing payment tokens via API was missed entirely in this marketing email...
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Users should be doing sanity checks of financial transactions on a regular basis. You even want an external party doing audits as frequently as is reasonable. That doesn’t mean every transaction needs to be manually revived, but major outliers and a random sampling is a good idea.
[deleted]
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#155I stopped using Stripe the day i had to pay for the chargebacks, fuck that, paypal is bad, but at least it's not that bad
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#156Earlier 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…
Not sure how software is going to always find "...credit card fraud, internal theft, mis-priced items, mistakes....".
I don't care how good AI in finding tumors in x-rays is, I still want a set of skilled eyes to confirm findings.
It's the same reason I double check all my paychecks to make sure I'm paid the right amount and the deductions are correct. All of it's automated on the backend, but it's still my money and worth double-checking.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#157My 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…
I think this is an unfair comparison. There is a big difference between checking the work of multiple employees who might type stuff in wrong or credit card fraud compared to OP who has a fully integrated billing system provided by a very large and well-funded company who have failed to get some real basics right.
The MINIMUM most people would expect would be a notification either by email or on the dashboard to say that an invoice cannot be processed and at least that would highlight the problem. Even better, when you enable Stripe Tax, it should highlight the people who cannot be charged tax and likewise when you add a new customer who doesn't have the right info, it should notify you.
I find it really frustrating when a multi-billion dollar company cannot think of UX 101 and the customer has to do the heavy lifting.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#158I 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…
I think it's reasonable to expect either (1) support to be at least as responsive and competent as sales or (2) compensation or refunds for poor service.
This works for any honest business. If you want a custom offering with hand holding, go with 1. If you want a scalable and streamlined unisize business which allows itself to make mistakes in order to build huge things for the masses, go with 2 and accept the losses.
I really dislike the middle ground compromise of having useless conversations with L1 reps who are either incompetent or whose hands are tied. "We've escalated this issue to super-serious, an expert will reach out to you within the next decade".
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
He didn't enable "Stripe Tax for Canada". He enabled Stripe Tax. The whole selling point of Stripe Tax is that it calculates tax for customers in every supported location. It needs customer location to function. He's supposed to charge tax in other locations where it's required too. Using Stripe Tax to only handle tax for customers in the home region of the company when the company also sells outside the home region…
> Using Stripe Tax to only handle tax for customers in the home region of the company when the company also sells outside the home region seems like a strange goal. It's a common goal. When becoming compliant with sales tax laws, it makes sense to prioritize the states/countries where the business has a physical presence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax#Enforcement_of_tax_o...
Better yet, if you don't have a physical presence in the USA (eg: the item was shipped from Canada), then the obligation of remitting the appropriate taxes often falls to the purchaser: https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-america/2016/12/guide-...
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#160Earlier 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…
> why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use?
They do. We can leave aside the practice in many European countries to compute your income taxes for you, based on reporting by your employer and financial services. Even in the US, high quality software is provided for sales tax compliance. In fact, according to the Supreme Court, the presence of that software is one of the main reason they overturned their "no interstate online sales tax" decision in 2018. One reason was
> Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement. This system standardizes taxes to reduce administrative and compliance costs: It requires a single, state-level tax administration, uniform definitions of products and services, simplified tax rate structures, and other uniform rules. It also provides sellers access to sales tax administration software paid for by the State. Sellers who choose to use such software are immune from audit liability.
Which, I guess to return to the point we set aside, is because companies can lobby for public software for their benefit, but tax prep companies can lobby against public software for their benefit.