Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Stripe Tax Story

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 299 posts

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#251

Post by newaccount74 »

thathndude wrote: post #220
newaccount74 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Thanks. Maybe my issue was that the people I hired just weren't competent enough.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#252

Post by deltarholamda »

alistairSH wrote: post #185
wildmanx wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Not just the “TurboTax” lobby, but also a strong contingent of anti-tax conservatives. One of their approaches to gain sympathy to their cause is to keep making taxes hard. If taxes are hard, the general population will want less of them.

>One of their approaches to gain sympathy to their cause is to keep making taxes hard

I'm not sure where you get this from. People on the right have been yelling about simplifying the tax code for a long time. Flat tax, "postcard-sized tax form," national sales tax, all kinds of ideas have been floated. Even eliminating the income tax altogether and going back to funding the government through tariffs, those the people who suggest that wear a lot of tri-corn hats or subscribe to "Reason" magazine.

The fact of the matter is the tax code is the biggest trough from which politicians can reward donors, lobbyists, and other allies. A nice tax carve-out for left-handed buggy whip manufacturers is easy and cheap, and nobody reads all 1100 pages of some omnibus bill, so whoever slid it in can claim to be "for small business!" (the right), or "making the rich pay their fair share!" (the left).

As for the general population, all of their taxes are taken out of their paycheck. Taxes aren't hard for them. They pay a few thousand in income and payroll taxes over the year, they get a thousand or so back in a refund, and they think everything is great.

If there was a bill that eliminated all the tax code and replaced it with a brochure-sized alternative, there might be some on the right who would object, but EVERYBODY on the left would lose their minds. I can't think of a single progressive who has supported a simplification of the tax code.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#253

Post by nrmitchi »

dabernathy89 wrote: post #62
nrmitchi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect, because I have been in a similar situation before, that the author is frustrated because the company first ignored/downplayed the significance of his concern, then blamed his issue on user error (without accepting responsibility), and then quietly modified their documentation and addressed the issue as if they had "just discovered it". When companies behave this way it feels like you're being gaslit, which…

> then quietly modified their documentation and addressed the issue as if they had "just discovered it" As he points out in the article, they alerted him to the documentation updates in the course of their emails back and forth. Fair point about being frustrated with the initial customer support experience, though. Definitely crappy.

> As he points out in the article, they alerted him to the documentation updates in the course of their emails back and forth.

Technically, this is true. From the story though, it sounds like the PM included this information after the author reached out to the PM directly. Only after that did support say "I see we reached out to you about documentation updated!".

So while yes, they did technically tell the author about the documentation update, I'm not sure I would classify it as them "alerting" the author.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#254

Post by XCSme »

> the tax engine knows that I do not need any additional information for subscriptions that are US-based or based in other countries as I have no obligations to collect tax there

Is this true? Don't you always have to collect/pay local taxes if you are selling stuff in a country? For example, you sell to a customer in Germany, your price must include German VAT.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#255

Post by unfocussed_mike »

Jiger104 wrote: post #250
unfocussed_mike wrote: post #173

The fact that it took the writer three months (!) to spot this problem sets up a situation (IMO) in which swearing for effect in a chat session is out of the question. It's partly on him. Anything to do with money and tax internationally is complex, and it should be monitored at least until you know it works, e.g. put dates in your diary to check your first international customers paid the right tax? I must say, the…

You might check out the feature below to allow for time acceleration, it is fairly new. https://stripe.com/docs/billing/testing/test-clocks

OK wow, I have never seen that, though I haven't done anything with subscriptions myself yet.

Thanks so much for pointing this out.

Looks like is is only for Billing/Subscriptions, rather than for the inter-account events in Stripe Connect that I am referring to in my case. At least so far. Oh I would _love_ time acceleration for Connect.

But it could have helped the writer of the original post test stuff out.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#256

Post by AlwaysRock »

maxwelldone wrote: post #123
Aeolun wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I discovered in actually using them has made me realize how much effort they put in to marketing to developers I think the problem is. When I used them like 5-6 years ago, their offering was absolutely legendary. So much so that I happily moved over from 1.5% fees on Authorize to 3% on Stripe. Right now? It’s basically become everything it seemed to be fighting against in the past.

What's a good alternative these days? Especially in NA.

Adyen and bolt seem to be popular.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#257

Post by rezonant »

XCSme wrote: post #254

> the tax engine knows that I do not need any additional information for subscriptions that are US-based or based in other countries as I have no obligations to collect tax there Is this true? Don't you always have to collect/pay local taxes if you are selling stuff in a country? For example, you sell to a customer in Germany, your price must include German VAT.

You are right. It doesn't excuse Stripe Tax, but a business can have both presence nexuses (ie we sell from there) and sales nexuses (ie we sell enough to there that the local laws say we need to register and collect taxes).

The details vary for the EU depending on whether the product is business-to-consumer or B2B and what kind of volume we're talking about. Some countries, such as the US, have a double taxation treaty with the EU that allows you to use a self-charge VAT structure when you do small amount of sales which has the effect of not needing the US seller to register for VAT, provided your tax authority (ie the IRS) authorizes you to participate under that treaty.

Correct handling of sales tax/VAT globally is complicated and I definitely had a "oh honey" moment when reading that sentence as well.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#258

Post by flutas »

nrmitchi wrote: post #253
dabernathy89 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then quietly modified their documentation and addressed the issue as if they had "just discovered it" As he points out in the article, they alerted him to the documentation updates in the course of their emails back and forth. Fair point about being frustrated with the initial customer support experience, though. Definitely crappy.

> As he points out in the article, they alerted him to the documentation updates in the course of their emails back and forth. Technically, this is true. From the story though, it sounds like the PM included this information after the author reached out to the PM directly . Only after that did support say "I see we reached out to you about documentation updated!". So while yes, they did technically tell the author ab…

> From the story though, it sounds like the PM included this information after the author reached out to the PM directly.

Exactly the case, and it's because he happened to have the PMs email. Not because Stripe gave it to him or offered to send the PM his way.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#259

Post by secabeen »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #177
posguy wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Incorrect, this is out of date. It's your responsibility but only over a threshold (and the rules / amount are different in every US state)

It is your responsibility, but the specifics of impact and enforcement are complicated. This looks like a nice summary: https://baranovcpa.ca/us-sales-tax/

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#260

Post by edwinwee »

a13n wrote: post #248

I had a similar horror story with Stripe recently where several customers got billed via payment methods that were explicitly disallowed on the subscription object. This cost us loads in unnecessary fees. When I reached out to support, I also felt insulted and like I was begging my cable company to refund the $5 they owed me. They refused to acknowledge that their product is broken or take any blame. I'm honestly jus…

Hm, could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and I can look into this?
Post reply on HN