Ask HN: How do you handle invoices and purchase orders?
On one hand we have numerous solutions for direct purchasing such as Stripe, Gumroad, etc. These are fully automated and a breeze working well for B2C transactions.
On the other hand other enterprises and government institutions skip right over that automation and typically reach out by email requesting purchase orders with invoicing. Requests like "Net-45" are common. It seems that for accrual-method accounting purposes it is extremely painful for them to just use the digital purchase form and enter a credit card.
Running a ramen-profitable small business though, it is hard to justify devoting a full time employee to this problem. In this world of small startups, has anyone found a way to automate thes B2B transactions -- even partially?
A side note: I occasionally work with software resellers, and find that even they want to do everything manually on both ends of the sale. If they would simply use the digital payment form on my end to abstract the manual work for me, I would happily grant a major discount -- and yet that is not how it goes. Manual emails to both their client and to my sales contact are the norm! Resellers seem uniquely poised to deal with this difficulty (and deserve a discount) and yet they do not take it up! Is there a good reason to keep everything manual like this? Help!