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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

#81

Post by Hackbraten »

londons_explore wrote: post #16

Random idea: Don't build a billing system. Or at least not a precise one. Have a price list as normal, but just guestimate the user's bills based on any easily accessible information. Eg. For a hosting company I might just count how many VM's they have active when the billing script runs . If the user isn't happy with the total, give them a button to correct the total and pay that. Spot check what the user's pay, and…

You’d still have to apply the right tax rate for every line item. If you allow the user to edit the total, then which of the tax amounts are you going to recalculate?

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#82

Post by AnhTho_FR »

onion2k wrote: post #57
Rafsark wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I'm Anh-Tho, one of Lago's co-founders here. Thanks for sharing! What did you do then? I'm curious!

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#83

Post by notch656a »

DocTomoe wrote: post #65
notch656a wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That american exceptionalism approach will work with private citizen customers. With business customers, leaning back in the legal framework encouraging tax fraud will not fly. They just won't buy from you then. That's why any US company wanting to do business in Europe either has an European subsidiary, or follows something that's compatible with EU invoicing schemes.

>. With business customers, leaning back in the legal framework encouraging tax fraud will not fly.

Yes which is why in nations like Portugal, where any business invoice may be subject to accountability to government, there totally isn't a massive informal (read: tax-evading) economy to deal with the fact that the government makes it literally impossible (at least in above words) to accept an invoice legal in the jurisdiction in which it was issued.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#84

Post by IAmEveryone »

cm2012 wrote: post #30
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…

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

The difference is marginal at best. Most of the requirements are obvious and never/rarely change, like your address or the date. And adding a an incrementing number to a set of documents isn't exactly rocket science, either.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#85

Post by sbierwagen »

notch656a wrote: post #77
pimterry wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't matter. For B2B, if you don't show your EU customers a valid invoice, they simply cannot pay you. It's not EU governments or post-purchase issues you have to deal, most of the time - it's trying to persuade a large accounting department to pay you unaccountable money. If you can't follow their invoicing requirements, it's just not going to happen.

>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…

Feature, not a bug. If there's pervasive lawbreaking, then the officials can collect more bribes.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#86

Post by aerovistae »

intuxikated wrote: post #72
aerovistae wrote: post #19

> To solve this problem at scale, we adopted a radical sharing approach. We’ve started building an Open-Source Alternative to Stripe Billing (and Chargebee, and all the equivalents). This is so great. I personally haven't had to deal with this problem, but I've worked at a number of organizations (and heard about many others!) where this sort of business logic had to be implemented. It's just reinventing the wheel. I…

> We need similar open source frameworks for common business use-cases - billing, subscriptions, order/purchase management, and so on. You mean like an ERP? There's 2 open source ones I can think of: - Odoo, which is the bigger one, mostly Open-source (CRM / sales / subscriptions / invoices / webshop / inventory / purchase) but some enterprise-only modules (Rental, Field Services), I work with this software daily as…

I hadn't heard of that! Maybe that is what I meant.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#87

Post by Brystephor »

AnhTho_FR wrote: post #36
Brystephor wrote: post #32

I've worked at two companies in their payment systems. This post does a good job of mentioning many of the billing system challenges. I think it understates how difficult and important idempotency is to maintain at scale with multiple teams though. Additionally, it didn't mention financial regulation changes. India had changes sometime in the last few years which required whole new systems built that were specific to…

Hey @Brystefor, I'm @Rafsark's co-founder. We could have spent more time on idempotency, indeed. We have not deep dived into the 3 other aspects you mentioned indeed, we're actually planning to 1/ open-source the articles and add additional challenges as they are mentioned 2/ open our roadmap based on these inputs as well Thanks for sharing! Will ping you back here when it's live PS: we had not thought of financial r…

Oh, I didn't even realize this was a blog for an open source project. I assumed it was someones personal blog.

Two other things that you may want to consider:

1. PCI compliance. If you're involved in the storage of payment information, you may want to look into these regulations.

2. Regarding point 3 of your mission "...only integrating with specific partners to lock you in (e.g., Stripe Billing only working with Stripe Payments)...". I think there are many companies out there who want to integrate with more than a single payment provider (eg Braintree, Stripe, Adyen, etc) but run into this problem. It increases the cost of payments due to the "rent-seeker" charge method they use. Providing a design framework for how a single company could integrate with multiple providers could be beneficial. This is something I've considered trying to build, but I think it could fit with this initiative.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#88

Post by AnhTho_FR »

cletus wrote: post #80

Pretty much everything is more complicated than people (including engineers) think. Take a simple example: selling clothing in a retail store. Sounds simple right? You have an inventory of items and someone pays for it. Should be a simple transaction, right? Well, now you're dealing with: - How do you determine the price? There might be a retail price but there are sales, discounts, overrides for various reasons (eg…

Hey Cletus! I'm Anh-Tho, one of the cofounders of Lago.

Totally agree with you on web3 identity and its edge cases, it's just billing ^10000 in terms of complexity.

I think for 'billing', usually people (especially non-tech people), don't understand the different blocks of the pricing stack: authorization, pricing grid, billing itself, invoicing (they often only see end-result: a receipt or invoice), payment gateways, dunnings, accounting etc). This post barely scratches the surface of it, but we intend to write and deep-dive more on each of these building blocks.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#89

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

notch656a wrote: post #77
pimterry wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't matter. For B2B, if you don't show your EU customers a valid invoice, they simply cannot pay you. It's not EU governments or post-purchase issues you have to deal, most of the time - it's trying to persuade a large accounting department to pay you unaccountable money. If you can't follow their invoicing requirements, it's just not going to happen.

>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…

European bureaucracy is out of control, and that's just the west. In the east and former Soviet states, it beggars belief.

Re: Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers

#90

Post by AnhTho_FR »

notch656a wrote: post #77
pimterry wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't matter. For B2B, if you don't show your EU customers a valid invoice, they simply cannot pay you. It's not EU governments or post-purchase issues you have to deal, most of the time - it's trying to persuade a large accounting department to pay you unaccountable money. If you can't follow their invoicing requirements, it's just not going to happen.

>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…

I'm Anh-Tho, one of a co-founders of Lago. I'm French, and I confirm, in B2B, no invoice (that is compliant, not a mere receipt) -> no payment.
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