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My Stripe Tax Story

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Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#211

Post by Pasorrijer »

Fr3dd1 wrote: post #187
fvold wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everything you wrote is correct. But still, if your product does not transparently show and alert such events, overall product quality is in my opinion bad. Dev or lead or product manager should not be ok with this. But this pretty mich reflects current state of software development. Errors and stuff are in way too many cases "ok" to occure.

I think what the poster is saying is that, as far as the software is concerned there IS no event to alert. You live in the US, but setup the taxes as if you live in the Caribbean? You're responsible for the setup, and as a business owner responsible for either setting it up correctly, verifying that someone set it up correctly or paying the auditors to do that for you.

Yeah it sucks, but the more we try to take the accountability out of the humans and put it into the software, the worse both the accountability and the software gets.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#212

Post by SteveNuts »

YawningAngel wrote: post #204
wil421 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have enough experience with local and federal government that there is no way I want them to build any kind of software. Much less a complicated tax software. It might work in the EU but in the US there’s state/county/municipality taxes that can get quite complicate. My zip code has a small area in my county and my county is at a 6% tax rate. Most of the zip code is another county that has a %7.5 tax rate. I have t…

If the tax law is so complex that the government can't correctly implement tax software, how is the government going to collect the taxes?

They pour the resources and money into the enforcement side instead of the collection side.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#213

Post by snovv_crash »

YawningAngel wrote: post #204
wil421 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have enough experience with local and federal government that there is no way I want them to build any kind of software. Much less a complicated tax software. It might work in the EU but in the US there’s state/county/municipality taxes that can get quite complicate. My zip code has a small area in my county and my county is at a 6% tax rate. Most of the zip code is another county that has a %7.5 tax rate. I have t…

If the tax law is so complex that the government can't correctly implement tax software, how is the government going to collect the taxes?

It's often easier to evaluate compliance than it is to engineer a compliant system.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#214

Post by throwaway2016a »

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.

No disagreement at all that ERPs are generally garbage, especially for how much they cost. But this comments makes me think you have never dealt with international taxes. The rules are insanely complex, there is no global standard for communicating the tax, multiple systems have to be in sync with each other, and some systems even use different rounding algorithms...

I'm all for blaming the software (which by the way in this case is made by a huge company I am 100% sure you know and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to operate)... but the real problem here is the complexities of tax (I used Canada as an example but the US is the absolute worst because each state makes their own lows) is not a software quality problem, it is a data and open standards (or lack their of) problem.

But since the lack of standards is not being fixed any time soon, sometimes it "is" the user's fault.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#215

Post by sokoloff »

YawningAngel wrote: post #204
wil421 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have enough experience with local and federal government that there is no way I want them to build any kind of software. Much less a complicated tax software. It might work in the EU but in the US there’s state/county/municipality taxes that can get quite complicate. My zip code has a small area in my county and my county is at a 6% tax rate. Most of the zip code is another county that has a %7.5 tax rate. I have t…

If the tax law is so complex that the government can't correctly implement tax software, how is the government going to collect the taxes?

The software would have to work everywhere. The tax collections (review/enforcement, really) process only has to work in one place. Tax law in one place is usually clear enough; the complexity is in the aggregate.

My state doesn’t have to give a rip that NYC has a city surtax on this but not that, or that some other jurisdiction treats clothing items up to $100 as non-taxable while we put the limit at $175.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#216

Post by chrissnell »

aaxe wrote: post #189
chrissnell wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad is not next to me to reply, but your rebuttal patterns a conversation that he and I had many times over the years, when I was first getting my start in business and tried to tell him he was too old fashioned in his business methods. The bottom line is that you absolutely have to be involved in all levels of your business if you want to be successful and don’t want to be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous.…

Your dad sounds awesome. If your dad loves the work, okay cool. But your effective implication is you cannot have anyone else do this, which is obviously absurd because there are companies much much larger than either of ours that pull it off. The key point is not "the owner has to do it", it's someone has to be held responsible for this. For smaller businesses, it's likely the owner. For someone like your dad's, it'…

To a point, yes. I mean, bikes have changed a ton in 51 years and I guarantee you my dad would struggle to work on the newfangled high end high tech stuff, nor would he be the guy that you'd want to professionally fit you to your new road bike. He's got people on the payroll who do that, for sure.

Bookkeeping is different, though. He's actually been defrauded by a bookkeeper in the early 1980s. I don't know the details but she was siphoning money from the business in some scheme, probably a 1981 version of OP's Stripe API issue. If you simply trust a person like this and don't verify regularly, the mistakes and frauds happen. Receipts is where the rubber meets the road for a retail biz and I just don't see a substitute for an owner who cares and checks.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#217

Post by throwaway2016a »

Dragony wrote: post #141
Fr3dd1 wrote: post #110

Earlier 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.

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

I tell my clients all the time why I can't just make a "quick change" and I have to manually review the data sometimes and go through a ton of code review. I tell them...

> As a human I can only mess up one or two orders a minute. Computers are uniquely qualified to mess up thousands of orders in seconds.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#218

Post by kalleboo »

aetherspawn wrote: post #192

I used to use Stripe to process payments. One day someone bought a huge item with a stolen card. Stripe sent me an email saying the payment had been “processed”, so I gave them the $3000 item. I later logged in and noticed “processed” meant “processing”, and the stolen card bounced at the bank a week later. They refused to take responsibility for sending me an email that clearly said the payment had been fully proces…

I worked for a company that went bankrupt due to sudden massive fraud using stolen credit cards on PayPal, that all went to chargeback which also inflicted a $20/chargeback fee from PayPal. They were something like $6000 in debt to PayPal in chargebacks and fees when they just folded.

PayPal does not protect you from stolen cards, at least they'd didn't back then (5 years ago maybe?)

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#219

Post by dhruvkar »

thathndude wrote: post #136
dhruvkar wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar situation as OP. My dad started the business (his 3rd overall) 22 years ago and it's been growing steadily since. My dad still does daily scans of our ERP. I run the business with him and we have 40 employees, and I too have had similar conversations with him. While I'm sure there is a better way to do this (e.g. invest in BI, hire and train a person to do this etc.), the fact of the matter is no one else is…

I think your mentality is right (as a small business owner myself). However, to push back a bit, I think sometimes it’s easy to believe that we’re the only ones who can do something because we’re the only ones who have lived and breathe it for 5+ (Pick your number) years. And one might be surprised if they actually tried outsourcing how competent some folks can be.

I completely agree.

Coming from the tech world, a lot of my focus has been setting up processes, piece-meal outsourcing and letting employees have more autonomy. Recently we even set up a small team in the Philippines to handle data entry.

However, I've grown to appreciate his view as well over the years.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#220

Post by thathndude »

newaccount74 wrote: post #194
thathndude wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your mentality is right (as a small business owner myself). However, to push back a bit, I think sometimes it’s easy to believe that we’re the only ones who can do something because we’re the only ones who have lived and breathe it for 5+ (Pick your number) years. And one might be surprised if they actually tried outsourcing how competent some folks can be.

Can you share what kind of tasks you've successfully outsourced? In my experience it was very hard to outsource task with a vague definition like "look for things that aren't running smoothly".

The low hanging fruit answer is "admin." It's easy to fall into this trap of "only I know how the whole business runs; so I should just keep doing admin stuff." But you'd be shocked at how quickly a competent administrative assistance can handle some of this stuff (including pre-drafting email responses in your "voice").

Next step up is stuff outside of your core-competency. So that's where the CPA comes in to take some financial stuff off your plate. This can be hybrid with an admin assistance.

Then you get into the "core" functions. For a media creator, that might mean editing. Again, it's easy to fall into a trap of thinking some other editor won't be able to match your style or voice. But when you hire someone who sees themself as primarily an editor, and they're good at their job, they're really good at adapting and adopting voice.

With all of these things, often the person you're offloading to can't match your output 1:1. But if they can get you 90% completed rough drafts of the final deliverable, there's immense value there all the same.

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