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My Stripe Tax Story

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Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#261

Post by SilasX »

codeofdusk wrote: post #145
SilasX wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks! Weird that for that one you have to click through to the ascii-text version and it's not in the format of the other articles.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#262

Post by anonymousiam »

anonymousiam wrote: post #113

Stripe is just awful. I have no experience from the vendor side, but as a customer, I've noticed that they seem to associate a credit card number with an email address. My business credit card is associated with dozens of different email addresses, but Stripe wants to use the one associated with my most recent purchase regardless of what email I provide to them. I get emails coming in to random (but valid) email addr…

I cannot edit or delete the above post, but I made a mistake and I must apologize to Stripe. I had confused it with Square. The above post should apply to Square and not Stripe, which means it is now off-topic.

Sorry.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#263

Post by anonymousiam »

edwinwee wrote: post #119
anonymousiam wrote: post #113

Stripe is just awful. I have no experience from the vendor side, but as a customer, I've noticed that they seem to associate a credit card number with an email address. My business credit card is associated with dozens of different email addresses, but Stripe wants to use the one associated with my most recent purchase regardless of what email I provide to them. I get emails coming in to random (but valid) email addr…

Customer email addresses are only stored within a business’s Stripe account and aren’t shared across businesses when the same credit card is used—so I’m curious to see what’s going on here. Could you forward an example purchase confirmation to me at edwin@stripe.com?

Edwin,

I began to draft an email with many attached receipts demonstrating the email confusion, but then I realized they were all from Square and not from Stripe.

Please accept my apologies for the above post. I would remove it if I could.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#264

Post by edwinwee »

anonymousiam wrote: post #263
edwinwee wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customer email addresses are only stored within a business’s Stripe account and aren’t shared across businesses when the same credit card is used—so I’m curious to see what’s going on here. Could you forward an example purchase confirmation to me at edwin@stripe.com?

Edwin, I began to draft an email with many attached receipts demonstrating the email confusion, but then I realized they were all from Square and not from Stripe. Please accept my apologies for the above post. I would remove it if I could.

No worries!

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#265

Post by rendall »

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…

> ...and he’s learned this habit over the decades the hard way...

Yes. 51 years in business. I'm positive that the "hard way" that Dad learnt his lesson was by losing money.

Please do not be judgmental of OP.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#266

Post by dikaio »

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…

Government made software… I imagine yearly or bi-yearly updates, horrendous UI/UX, count me out.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#267

Post by cushychicken »

chrissnell wrote: post #246
cushychicken wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a persistent meme on HN that it's straightforward to make a business that "runs on autopilot", with no human intervention. I'll admit that such a business is possible, but I'm deeply skeptical of the durability of such a business. I'd much rather bet on a business owner like your dad, who's deeply involved. Sounds like your dad's receipt reading was a great habit to have, and paid dividends far outside of jus…

LOL, it's true. The idea of the quick exit is also part of the HN culture and I think that would be very foreign to people like my dad. People who build small but profitable, businesses and run them for the long-term are underappreciated in the tech world. I don't know about you but if I was building a SaaS, I'd be looking for the tech equivalent of In-n-Out Burger: something you build and spend most of your time mak…

I'm right there with you. I've been building and running a job board for the last few months, and I'm hoping it becomes my own little SW equivalent of an In-N-Out. It's profitable, and slowly growing, so it's moving in the right direction.

Someday it'll be my own personal Double Double Animal Style.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#268

Post by [deleted] »

deltarholamda wrote: post #252
alistairSH wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peop…

[deleted]

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#269

Post by floodyberry- »

wildmanx wrote: post #150
floodyberry- wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless you're Kim Peek you're not doing inventory or trends in your head.

Re: My Stripe Tax Story

#270

Post by hardwaresofton »

nostrebored wrote: post #201
hardwaresofton wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any examples or could you mention some industries?

I worked briefly in sales at stripe, and most large enterprises are on or have considered Adyen. Keep in mind that many of these businesses will use more than one payment solution. The business I’m working at now splits traffic between adyen, stripe, and others. Anecdotally, stripe has the best payment success rate of any of our providers.

Would love to learn more about that business -- I've pondered trying to build a payments API that could offer a way to transparently switch between payment providers, hadn't seen too many companies that were doing it

I know of Chargebee, Recurly, etc but I'm not sure those companies will let you actually spread payments between or if you pick one provider and use that. I've had people ask me if I knew of a company/product that could let them be less reliant on Stripe alone.

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