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Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

getlago.com

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Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#51

Post by johnrgrace »

spchampion2 wrote: post #5

Just 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…

And most big companies who agree to pay you net X days, that usually is after the presentation of a correct invoice. The invoice doesn't get to them, or it isn't right the clock doesn't start for them to pay you. Getting invoices wrong can quickly result in major cashflow drops.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#52

Post by AnhTho_FR »

daxaxelrod wrote: post #41

Poked around their site a bit, they claim to be open source but I don't see a link to a git repo anywhere. Also searched GitHub a bit but might have missed it.

Hey @daxaxelrod! I'm one of the cofounders of Lago, the lib will be opened very soon, we're in the final steps of QA, that's why. I will make sure to ping you back here when it is. We wanted to share this post about our first-hand experience with billing a bit ahead of this. Thanks for your patience!

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#53

Post by baronswindle »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #46
cm2012 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just one of many reasons its easier to do business in the US

Protecting consumers is always bad for business

In this particular case, do you think non-US governments could protect the interests of consumers in their jurisdictions in a way that is less unfriendly to the businesses that want to sell to them?

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#54

Post by nico75 »

Solid job unearthing the numerous billing system challenges (almost triggering PTSD from prior experiences interacting with such systems...). While I haven't fully checked out the details of the solution you offer, I'm excited to see builders embarking on building better solutions :huggingface

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#56

Post by theptip »

lelandbatey wrote: post #12

Billing is a nightmare, and if I had one piece of advice for people building a pay-for-what-you-use system like most SaaS, it's this: DO NOT bill against your business logic entities. They change, and doing a COUNT at the end of the month won't catch all things which changed or which cost you money during the month. Instead, figure out what you bill for and and when you do that thing, record a row in a DB or into a s…

Sound advice. Anything to do with accounting, you’ll probably want to treat as an append-only log of events. (Note, you can also use event-sourcing and have your domain entities _be_ events, in a billing bounded context that might make sense. Not usually the first approach I’d recommend though.)

On a similar note, make sure you think about bitemporality as well. In other words, “effective_at” vs. “”created_at”. You might learn that due to a bug, you didn’t record a billable event, and you need to insert it into the history (say, to put it in the correct billing period). But setting the “created_at” in the past brings a bunch of issues; it’s confusing and you’ll soon hit issues where lying about created-time trips you up. (Migrations, reasoning about what version of the code applied what events, etc).

Fowler has good further reading here: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bitemporal-history.html.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#57

Post by onion2k »

Rafsark wrote: post #20
spchampion2 wrote: post #5

Just 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…

Hi! We decided to aggregate all costs of a "billable period". Imagine you bill your customers monthly (the billable period), all the charges (usage-based features + subscription) will appear as line items of a single invoice. This enables you to gather all the fees of a period into a total invoice, but still be able to provide granularity to your customers (breakdown of all the fees to be paid).

Hi, customer here. We'd like to change our billing period to start on the 31st of every month, and we'd like to pay 90 days in arrears, and we'd also like you to invoice us ahead of the billing month. Oh, and we're big enough that losing our business will end your startup, so don't get it wrong. Thanks!

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#58

Post by bcrosby95 »

I've had to deal with subscription based billing, and in my experience it wasn't a nightmare. There are some corner cases, but, those exist in every domain. And the stakes are definitely raised since you're dealing with people's money.

Usage based billing sounds like a nightmare though.

Taxes in the USA are a nightmare too. I have a friend that lives on a street, and for one side the tax rate is 7.5%, and the other side its 9.25%. Literally no company we tested got this right. Even Amazon.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#59

Post by notch656a »

AnhTho_FR wrote: post #45
cm2012 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just one of many reasons its easier to do business in the US

Hey cm2012, I'm one of the cofounders of Lago (my business partner wrote this post). Actually even if you're incorporated in the US, if you serve a client in EU for instance, the VAT rules of EU apply to how you're supposed to invoice your customer, beyond a certain transaction limit. So... unless you're based in the US, and only serving US-based users, it gets complex very fast!

If you wire your dollars onto US soil, for a service performed in the US by US business, good luck getting the US legal system to enforce upon that US business whatever euro-cucked invoicing scheme is called for.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#60

Post by wonton53 »

spchampion2 wrote: post #5

Just 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…

I work on a payment system that invoices consumers on behalf of other companies and pays out the money to these companies by splitting the payout on multiple partners (luckily I do not handle the support and follow-up). The system have ability to refund invoices and customers some times end up paying more than or just parts of the invoice. On top og all this it integrates with several old 90s systems with poor datetime handling and poor uptime (some times a windows xp box in the cudtomers offices). It also handles card payments and over all, by far the hardest thing to get right is the invoicing. Its just so extremely fuzzy and time sensitive.
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