There's few things worse in B2B than encountering a system where engineers have reinvented general accounting principles from scratch.
Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers
221–230 of 372 posts
Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers
#222I agree with thesis but there are entire aspects of this that he didn't even touch upon. There is a multiverse of different billing nightmares for engineers. I worked on a piece of software that bridged billing data from IBM mainframes out to the web. The hoops that had to be jumped through to get data out of the mainframes and the number of hacks and kludges involved was legendary. Likely everyone here has paid many…
Could you expand on what kind of hacks/kludges were required?
Basically the mainframes were almost incapable of any data exchange that was meaningful in the 21st century. Instead of IBM doing something same the market just built software to scrape bills off the mainframes printer output, which you could intercept in electronic form. But then every accounts bill files were different. And sometimes the mainframes moved data around on the page, and so on and so forth.
Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers
#223Just 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…
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Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
By "temporal model" do you mean relational tables of "customer X used Y amount of this resource at price Z from timestamp A to timestamp B" or ... ?
In field metering situations you can have the timeline of each meter, when it records data points, and then you have the different timeline of the backend service, when it actually _receives_ data points. Bonus points if the meters can send data out of order.
Ah, thanks. OMFG and I thought our billing was hard. You're in my thoughts and prayers!
Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers
#225Usage 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…
Stripe offers simple metering, but in the end, you make the job of calculating metering charges (aggregate all usage and send the value to stripe). It’s becoming harder when you are an API or a cloud company who want to bill a server usage for instance. Calculations are getting heavy, costful and hard to maintain. This is why I do think stripe is not a usage based solution, and also the reason why I decided to create a company trying to solve this pain :)
Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
>they simply cannot pay you. Do people ever stop and wonder WHY in nations like Portugal the informal economy is roughly DOUBLE of say the US? When every invoice must be available to the government, what actually ends up happening is non-conforming invoices either get made up by the customer or the money magically flows out under some other auspice. Making it literally illegal to accept an invoice that is legal in th…
Quoted post unavailable.
>Do people ever stop and wonder WHY the US is the biggest tax haven on earth?
I consider this an advantage of the US, not disadvantage.
Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers
#227Hi!
I co-led the billing stack re-write at Uber circa 2017 and it was an absolute nightmare.
Some of the unexpected hard things that are not mentioned in this article:
- Manage promotion was very complex
- Modeling money (we used to model it as cents ie 1/100 of the common denomination ... turns out it broke a lot of countries like Japan where the Japanese Yen doesn't have cents)
- Timezone is a hellhole
One interesting open source project was https://killbill.io/
PS: Since I built a billing and invoicing startup .. check it out: zenbill.com
Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers
#228This is some brilliant, next-level, content marketing here. Nicely done.
Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers
#229Hi! I co-led the billing stack re-write at Uber circa 2017 and it was an absolute nightmare. Some of the unexpected hard things that are not mentioned in this article: - Manage promotion was very complex - Modeling money (we used to model it as cents ie 1/100 of the common denomination ... turns out it broke a lot of countries like Japan where the Japanese Yen doesn't have cents) - Timezone is a hellhole One interest…
Hey thanks for showing me this. What lies beyond the starter plan in concrete terms?
Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers
#230Do not worry. Blockchain will solve or at lease simplify all of these problems. It is the way.
Even if with blockchain and crypto you need to define a logic to bill your customer. This logic is pre-transactional and define how much you need to price the transaction.
Adopt a nothing is fungible, everything is serialised approach and maintain real equivalence classes instead of assuming fungibility as a proxy of replaceability.