Is this what enterprise means? | Hacker News Reader

Is this what enterprise means?

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459 pointssteffoz118 comments

This is common in the Enterprise and makes me wonder how many companies are undermined by their own accounting/billing departments. Typical problems include:

1) Vendor agrees to to NET 60, but begins to display warnings to end users on day 30.

2) We want to purchase 100 licenses in bulk, but vendor will only sell individual licenses directly to each user, who must pay using the vendor's payment system, with no exceptions or alternatives.

3) Vendor does not have a method to process payment for multiple invoices combined in one check.

4) Vendor sends invoice to wrong account at the same enterprise (way too common).

What's frustrating about these examples is that there is no sales pitch needed; we've already decided to purchase the product. Taking our money shouldn't be the hardest part.

I have some direct experience with this kind of thing on the vendor side and here is how it happened:

1. Launch a SaaS app that people like, with self-service signup and monthly billing by credit card.

2. Continue to grow and become more successful.

3. New leadership comes in, and decides that the path to growth is hiring a bunch of sales people and selling to "enterprises" instead of self service people with credit cards.

4. The sales people start selling to enterprises and promising terms that not only can the billing system not support, but that engineering hasn't even been asked to look into yet.

5. Yell at engineering for not "supporting our sales team" and try to get them to fix it, without slipping other feature launches, and without hiring more engineers.

6. Look like an idiot to all of your enterprise customers because you're selling them a product that was never designed for their needs, and without appropriate engineering scale to change it.

And this is why you decouple your systems as good as possible. The humans in your company need to be able to just prolong premium times manually. When the customer pays in diamonds. Or you want to say thank you to someone and add half a year for free. Ir you decide to accept payments in bitcoin tomorrow.

Never build the payment system tight coupled to the rest. Humans need to be able to overrule anything, anytime.

This should be a rule of thumb for everything.

I agree, but herein lay the rub.

For every exception, you need someone on top of it. You have a limited pool of people to distribute this knowledge to, and the responsibility for maintaining this knowledge to even if that just invoves knowing where to look to figure something out.

Overrides are tricky to accomodate, standardize, and organize if you don't nail dpwn the appropriate data model for the process.

Yup, this was a lesson I learned the hard way when I built out billing for our SaaS product. I had spent weeks thinking about user accounts, team accounts, subscription, integration with Stripe, how the UI would look, how I would verify VAT numbers for European customers, etc etc etc. In the end I threw all the code away because not a single customer that we had would have used self-checkout billing anyway, everything happens via email, purchase orders, billing portals like Ariba, etc. Monthly subscriptions are far and few between, pay-per-use is something that almost no customer would be interested in. Some customers actually wanted multi-year subscriptions, which Stripe doesn't even support.

It's emails and spreadsheets all the way down if you're building a product for an Enterprise audience.

Based upon this series of postings, it sounds like the problems in the original tweet are the result of decoupled enterprise payment systems, rather than the opposite. As if someone somewhere forgot to manually flip some flag or that they paid wasn't properly distributed throughout the byzantine distributed system.

The GGP used the wrong term. What he describes is a system that is overridable, not decoupled.

You are right in that decoupled systems aren't good.

This is all well and good if you build your product from the beginning with the vision that it will some day be sold by sales people to huge companies. But if your expectation is that it will always be self service, a bunch of design and engineering work to make it flexible just looks like wasted effort. If you guess wrong in either direction in your early development you'll have problems. Either get to market more slowly because you spent time up front building for a future that may never come, or get to market quickly and deal with the repercussions later.

It can be both. AWS and Google in particular (Microsoft was obviously always an enterprise company) started out the individual credit card route and I'd argue a major reason they've been able to grow--AWS better than Google modulo GSuite--is that they recognized they actually needed an enterprise sales force and the things that are associated with it.

Google has been exceedingly difficult to work with from an Enterprise standpoint. We spend millions with them for Google Workspace and I don't even know our account executive's name, nor have we ever talked with them if we even have one. Everything is done through our VAR.

In the meantime I'm well aware of and speak to our Microsoft rep regularly, they know our business and what we need, and have been helping round up resources for upcoming projects and initiatives. It's night and day between MS and Google.

It seems like Google thinks their products are so perfect and infallible that they can cut out the human element entirely. That may work for personal Gmail accounts and such but not so great when you spend millions with them.

Isn’t it the point of a VAR that the VAR, not the vendor, owns the client relationship?

Yes but we still have relationships directly with our other vendors (Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, Red Hat, Cisco, VMware, the list goes on).

Despite buying all those through a VAR we still have account managers/executives, dedicated systems engineers that we work with directly at the vendor, except Google.

"Sometimes there will be bugs."

Having human overrides to correct or change data is equally useful for just fixing what you get wrong yourself, as it is for special cases.

This sounds terrifying in its own way, but one of the best decisions I made at a tiny (5 person) startup a few years ago was sitting the smart, non-technical CEO down and teaching him SQL. All our data lived in a Postgres database, and he was amazed by the sort of questions he could ask the database. I showed him some SQL desktop tool (and helped him set it up). And showed him some different sql queries he could run and how to export data into CSV for excel. He instantly understood the “single source of truth” idea and why data modelling was important. He was gleeful about being able to change content on the website without asking someone else to do it for him.

I’m sure he’ll make a mess of something down the line, and I hope someone after my time added audit logs (to track what he inevitably changes and breaks). But there’s something deep and important in empowering other aspects of the business to interact with the computing silo. There’s a time for automation. And there’s a time before that where custom tooling isn’t worth building yet. And just changing records manually is the right approach.

> Humans need to be able to overrule anything, anytime.

This needs to be a guiding principle of anyone who builds any sort of software.

This. "I can't do this, the computer doesn't let me" ought to be as absurd a statement as "I can't do this, the intern doesn't let me".

Especially in avionics...

Saab sells a plane where moving the controls manually does not disable the autopilot....

I'm not sure this is necessarily a good rule of thumb. There are plenty of times humans need to be protected from themselves--that's why regulation exists to prevent fraud, etc. It'd be ludicrous for a single sales employee to override payments right into their personal account.

It is SOFTware so it can always be changed. The question becomes who can do the changes and when (which ends up being much trickier to answer)

And then bunch of naive idealists build system for payments without most important feature - reversibility. Of course, it's used only for speculation and illegal stuff.

I think this class of issues partly comes from that sales people have much relaxed, politics focused cognition compared to engineers, and are in disregard of non-human entities. They don’t have distinction between MUST or SHALL or SHOULD, everything is MAY or at best RECOMMENDED, and everything you may say or do must be attributed to a person.

So when told there is this thing which must be done by sales that prevents machines doing what that affects customers, it’s interpreted as either an IT guy is making incomprehensibles or hypotheticals because machines cannot be subject of a sentence, and as an empty demand with no return because neither party gains credits from the conversation.

And we’ll end up in “I told you! You had to!” “Told you what? You didn’t say anything”.

So who decided to get "new leadership"?

The board of directors replaced a founder CEO with an external CEO, new CEO hired a new exec team. Edit: To clarify, things were going well, but the company was scaling and the founder did not want to be CEO of a large company because he wanted to mostly focus on product stuff. So he worked with the board to bring in a "professional" CEO.

> we've already decided to purchase the product. Taking our money shouldn't be the hardest part.

Oof.

I recall one occasion in a small retail store years ago where I got so frustrated at being ignored by the employees, despite already knowing what I wanted and I just needed someone to fetch it from the back. Eventually I held my wallet aloft and asked why nobody here would take my money.

Shut up and take my money, indeed.

There's also the uncomfortable situation where the management model at a company assumes that every sale is the result of customer service, and any time you sell yourself they have to wrangle the system while you stand there watching. I suspect that more companies do this than I think, and some salespeople are doing the wrangling without alerting me to their activity. They are just much better at passing for normal than some other places.

take my money

One thing retail consultants do is to watch people checking out and note the obstacles. A classic problem is checkout clutter - impulse buy items at the checkout getting in the way of putting merchandise on the counter. In stores without carts, checkout clutter reduces sale amount, because customers subconsciously don't want to reach the counter and have no place to put the stuff. The Gap, which got this, always had big, clear counters. Bed, Bath and Beyond doesn't get this.

Eventually I held my wallet aloft and asked why nobody here would take my money.

I had an experience like that decades ago, in a large J.C. Penny in New Jersey. I'd just moved to the area and was buying a whole set of linens, pillows, and towels in the middle of the day. So I had an armload of merchandise stacked above my head. I reached a counter in the multi-floor department store but there were no staff around. No one on the whole floor.

I saw a phone behind the counter, so I dialed 0 and got someone. I told them I was at the checkout in Linens and there was no one on the sales floor.

Several minutes later, about six people showed up. Not clerks. The store manager, some junior people, and a grey-haired executive in an expensive suit who was deferred to by the others. By now, there were two other customers lined up behind me. The manager sent off some of the junior people to search for the missing clerk, and they came back empty. The store manager looked scared. The grey-haired executive didn't say a word to his people. He just unlocked the cash register and handled the transaction himself. He did two transactions before someone was found to take over.

I suspected I had just seen the end of some careers.

This could only have happened decades ago - for the past 10 years department stores have felt borderline unattended, at least below the lower upscale threshold of e.g. Nordstrom.

Grand huge stores in prime real estate in world cities, basically empty. Elegiac energy.

I wonder if they would have ignored you still if you politely asked for help. Otherwise, I can understand your frustration.

Yeah, it's a bit like trying to buy a watch that get advertised in magazines and billboards but impossible to buy at the jewellery store. Thanks Rolex.

Sometimes its difficult to part with your money

At robo target yesterday. No lanes open, no employees around except a 15 year old kid who told me they don't have the keys to "unlock" the 14.99 headphones off the wall. They called it in. I waited 10 mins. Walked back to the headphones and just YOINKED the box and the stupid plastic bit securely holding it got left behind. Then I had to stand in robo line to checkout like a good citizen - I could have walked out!

BIZARRO

This is a problem in a bunch of larger retail stores here in Australia.

JB Hifi, Harvey Norman, Myer, David Jones, Bing Lee, Anaconda and more - I've walked in knowing what I want, finding a sales person to let me buy it is near impossible. When you do find someone who works there "Oh, sorry, I don't work in that department" is the response half the time, and "Sorry, I'm with another customer at the moment, I'll be with you shortly" is most of the remaining times.

Purchasing online for 'click and collect' isn't necessarily any better - I've stood waiting at the collection desk for the better part of an hour while someone goes to find thing that I've already paid for and been told is ready for pickup just an hour prior.

Retailers have gone to try and compete with online by trying to match prices rather than just better service.

If I'm walking into a store it's because I either want it now, damn the premium, or need to see/feel it to know if it's right.

> got so frustrated at being ignored by the employees, despite already knowing what I wanted and I just needed someone to fetch it from the back

This has happened to me repeatedly at Apple stores in NYC, any time I've tried to purchase a phone or laptop. It's an extremely frustrating experience, especially for a relatively large purchase. I'd happily wait in a line, just give me some form of ordered queue please. Deli counters can handle this, so why can't a $2 trillion company?

Business idea: billing system for enterprise SaaS software.

But then they would have to customize that and create so many exceptions that it begs the idea for another business idea: Billing system for enterprise SaaS billing software company.

I agree with you but it turns out billing is a hard, unsolved problem.

Basic monthly SaaS subscriptions charged automatically to a credit card? Simple. Selling physical products with a shopping card system? Harder but plenty of existing systems that do it well. Anything else is surprisingly hard, especially at enterprise scale with the level of customization that introduces.

IMO there's a good startup opportunity for a no code billing system that is highly customizable, auditable, and testable. Seeing the level of customization that's often needed I don't know if it's even possible.

Basic monthly SaaS subscriptions charged automatically to a credit card

Even that's no simple anymore.

If you're in the EU, there's new laws around subscriptions, so you have to be able to handle a customer being forced to renew their subscription by re-inputting their security code.

So now Stripe (not their fault really) has a ridiculously complicated paymentintent pathway that's worse than paypal, forcing you to send users to their site, plus you have to write a whole pathway for if a subscription gets flagged for renewal.

Unrolled: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1389946268764475394.html

#hownottousetwitter

Summary: Salesforce acquires heroku and alarming billing errors ensue.

Anatomy of a buy-out:

Step 1. "We bought this company because we love the product, nothing is changing"

-- At this point, smart employees (that have been here before) without retention bonuses are leaving

Step 2. "We are going to combine some processes, to lower our costs"

--There goes many of the backend people that actually knew the how/why of the system.

Step 3. "Our customers love our support and development, and are willing to pay a bit more. We can cut back/outsource some development/support costs, to increase profit. Just a bit, to make our money back"

-- At this point, if your retention bonus is fulfilled, you are gone

Step 4. "This quarterly profit isn't high enough to meet analysts expectations. We are cutting 10% from every group's budgets"

--at this point, the only people left are those that have no other options.

Step 5. "We have problems in Engineering, Support, and operations. Lets outsource it, so we don't keep having to deal with all this turnover".

Step 6. "Our sales are a fraction of their former level. Lets take this huge pile of cash we made, and buy another company. We love their product!"

Rinse and repeat!

Too many great products ruined in the pursuit of growth and greed.

There's an earlier Step 2 where they tell you that they aren't going to tell you how to manage your division, and then tell you that they won't pay for some of your initiatives.

Because strangling an initiative by withdrawing all funding isn't saying 'no' I guess? I'll never understand how that works.

Usually that squeeze happens in the second fiscal year, and in some cases the 'combine processes' step is characterized as a carrot instead of a stick.

Depends. Plenty of companies growth model is through purchasing brands and combining "synergies". CHD is a great example. They acquire a compajy and its IP, but the factories and all and keep useful employees and buy everyone else out. Arm and Hammer, Trojan Condoms, Oxiclean, Toothpastes, toothbrushes, cat litter, everything in the grocery that's not food!

A company that I worked for got acquired by a vastly larger company, who is in turn owned by an even larger company.

When it was announced we were being acquired, one of the first questions was "What are the retention bonuses".

"We don't plan to have any retention bonuses" is the answer that came back from the new owners.

A few months later I'm talking to a VP of something-or-other in the acquiring organisation who's commenting "Yes, we've noticed you're having a lot of people departing. Company X who we acquired a few years ago had the same thing, we're not sure why".

This was while being told "nothing will change for you", to be immediately followed by "We're getting rid of X and Y and Z and changing work flexibility policies."

Salesforce acquired Heroku 11 years ago—only 3 years after it was founded.

No dashboard, invoice amounts don't add to the total, etc. Doesn't Salesforce dogfood their own stuff? They have a billing product:

https://www.salesforce.com/products/sales-cloud/tools/cpq-so...

They know better that to risk the suspension of their account and deletion of their data by using a shit service provider.

This sounds like a less funny version of the time I ordered a couch off Amazon.

I ordered 1 couch, I paid for 1 couch, I was delivered 1 couch. I was delivered 1 more couch a week later. I called to explain the error and they came and took 1 couch. I received notice that I needed to schedule delivery of 1 couch. I called and got the delivery of 1 couch cancelled. I received notice of a refund for 1 couch. I called to explain that I needed to pay for 1 couch. I authorized Amazon to charge me again for my 1 couch I was sitting on.

Each time I spoke to Amazon I was given a $75 credit. I still have never been charged for my 1 couch.

They might have spent more on solving this than your couch was worth.

It was $1000 couch so possibly? I would imagine dispatching a freight shipper to pickup a couch was easily a couple hundred bucks though so I'm just surprised they never charged me again.

I got a free couch and over $200 in credit for my trouble from Amazon.

I had the same experience w/ my Apple AirPod pros. I thought I lost my pair, so ordered replacements. The first time, they only sent 1 of 2 headphones. I called, they shipped 2 new ones. I called Apple to return the extra bud, some wires got crossed, and they sent 2 more.

At this point, I obviously found my originals. So I called Apple to try and send back the 3 extras they sent me (I would still have my originals + the replacements I paid for). They were unable to coordinate a return, told me to keep all of them.

I now have 7 apple airpod buds.

Anyone know if Apple counted this as the sale of 7 units?

Only the first pair counted as a sale, 1 sku of 2 units plus a case. The rest were replacements with their own SKU (probably) and are "sold" through a different channel. Revenue from Apple Support is still revenue, but it's not direct retail sales revenue like you're thinking.

Also, I had a similar problem where I wanted a replacement airpods and a replacement case and had to wait for 3 boxes and ship back 3 boxes, and at one point got an extra bud sent to me and at another point got an empty laptop box with an empty airpods box sent to me. The whole experience of dealing with Apple Support by mail completely turned me off doing anything support-related by mail. At least Amazon figured out that store credits don't need anything to be mailed back! Apple seems a lot more competent in-store when these kind of supply chain goofs can be hidden away by store staff. It makes me wonder how often supplies are sent to the wrong store or need to be counted again, etc.

Right now I'm waiting for a different part of Salesforce, Tableau, to get back to me about a licensing snafu where they billed me for the contract renewal, received my payment, but failed to have a system check if my licenses have expired and need to be re-issued, apparently. I suppose most people just reach out and ask for licenses keys to be re-assigned in advance, silly me for assuming it would be easy. This is definitely what enterprise means... Also my invoices from 4-5 years ago have disappeared from their system, and are the only evidence I have of what I purchased in the first place. Everything else lists a simple maintenance renewal sku and that's it. Feels like they forgot why I'm paying them a maintenance fee in their rush to ask for it.

> another point got an empty laptop box with an empty airpods box sent to me.

maybe this is some kind of keep alive. we don't have any parts for you yet, just checking in with you at the shipping-empty-boxes layer

Yeah, I think the intent was to ship me something to return a product with, except, of course, that each of the replacement products were their own containers to return the defective products...

At the 1996 MacWorld there was a bin of floppies for Earthlink's dial-up service supporting the then-new World Wide Web.

They weren't prepared for the server crush. I made nine attempts to create an account, before succeeding. Each time the attempt hung in mid-session. Once I got far enough to see my preferred login was not available. In my frustration I gave that presumed stranger a referral credit.

Then I got billed for nine accounts. There were unique transaction numbers, but my credit card company didn't use them, and couldn't keep track of otherwise identical transactions.

To this day I want Earthlink to rot in hell for how they treated me throughout this conflict. They brought this on themselves. They accused me of fraud for the unintended self-referral. As Don Johnson once said in a less safe-for-work context, we all rely on the kindness of strangers.

Amazon's entire customer service philosophy is basically will give you store credit out of good will.

For example I once couldn't figure out how to build a table right, and I hopped on the phone with their customer service department and they refund it half of the price of the table. The same thing happened where I had a monitor which 8 months after I purchased it started having problems, they just refunded half the price.

I'm pretty sure this only works for me because I spend at least $1,500 a month via Amazon, but even then it's business genius to operate like this. Many retailers would rather leave you out to dry, for example I purchased some shoes found they didn't fit and I was shocked when I simply couldn't return them. Guess I'll never go to that store again.

> I'm pretty sure this only works for me because I spend at least $1,500 a month via Amazon

What are you buying such that you're spending at least $18,000 a year on Amazon?

I got close to that after buying a house and filling it with whatever things I figured out I needed but didn’t want to drive to the store for (tools, cleaning supplies, kitchen stuff, holiday decorations, non food consumables, etc.)

I can’t see sustaining it indefinitely, but for a year or even two wouldn’t shock me if you’re not frugal and have a big empty house.

The short answer is as a single person with a significant amount of expendable income, I buy a lot of toys. The long answer is I buy almost everything except for food off of Amazon. Need a couch, get it off Amazon, want a shiny new video game controller, Amazon, clothing, Amazon.

Now to be fair, 1,500 might be more of an outlier month, with the average month being closer to 900 or 800$.

I used to do this, but now I check aliexpress.com first - usually I can find things at a third of the price, sometimes 10x cheaper, and I haven't really felt a lack of quality (just shipping speed).

Yeah but good luck returning something from AliExpress.

I'm more into getting the stuff I want fast, and making sure it does what I want.

I feel the same way. I don't spend nearly as much as you but I'm an Amazon Prime user and I haven't ever had an issue getting a refund on a product and in some cases where I ask to cancel a delivery after speaking to a representative, I get credit to use on my next purchase.

I got a refund on something that explicitly said no returns, no refunds when I bought it. Was a $800 automatic driveway gate opener.

They’ve started trying to see if the can help you use/install the product but that’s the only inconvenience

When sound cards were still a thing even in mid-level PCs I once tried to call Dell for a driver issue related to the sound card that the high-end PC had come equipped with.

I got zero help with the software issue, but they sent me a new card. I sold it on Ebay for ~$70 though so I did not complain. I solved the driver issue myself.

My guess is that Amazon is in such a strong position with its suppliers that they don't have to care.

I know a story of a guy who tried to sell a product via MediaMarkt. (A somewhat big German retailer) You have to take everything unsold back. They only pay you after 6 month. The world for a small retailer is usually the other way around. Pay upfront and sit on unsold stock. MediMarkt is small in comparison to Amazon. That is why they don't care if you tell them 10 month later that you don't like your "new" TV. It's not their loss.

A funny experience with DMV:

I sent my payment via regular mail. 1 month later still don't have my registration renewal, so I start worrying. I call my bank to block the check, and go to DMV offices in person and make a payment using a credit card.

After a couple of weeks I receive 2 letters from DMV the same day. One saying I double paid, and hence they are now include a check with my payment back. And another one saying my original check has bounced and that now I will have to make the payment using cashier's check and pay an extra $20 for the bounced check.

I get a cashier check for the amount plus the $20 and make yet another payment.

A couple of weeks later I receive another letter from DMV with a check returning the $20 penalty.

So overall in the end we did balance things out, but took a while :D

If you had missed that renewal payment deadline for the DMV, you get an automatic fee+60% fine on top and the only way to pay is via cashier's check, which you can find out by calling the most punitive phone tree/hold system I've ever experienced. I think it took something like 5 hours to actually reach a person, by which point it was after hours and they had gone home so the system hung up.

I had simply made a transcription error on the account number and the letter took 1.5mos to get back. That was a few days after the deadline.

What couch?

This one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I52XHLO/

They seem to do this kind of thing all the time. Just recently, I ordered a few low-value-ish things, like $75 total. Email and app said it was delivered, but no package to be found, even a couple days later. Spent like half an hour digging through their web UI to find the "package never arrived" option, and they just refunded me without even talking to a person or answering any questions. Okay then.

Then a couple days later, the package turned up after all. Turned out, the building staff hand-wrote the wrong apartment number in. I guess it took a couple of days for whoever was in the other apartment to get it, open it, realize it wasn't their stuff, send it back to the building staff, they figure out what went wrong, and tell me to pick it up.

So now I have the package and the refund. I spent another 10 or 20 minutes on Amazon trying to find an option for I got the package after all. Couldn't find anything. Gave up and left it alone. I guess Amazon would rather let me keep the money than bother building the infrastructure for that case. I have a feeling it would take even longer to figure out a phone number to call and wait on hold to talk to a person who had the authority to do something not on a pre-set list.

I had a similar experience but it was due to FedEx constantly delivering Amazon packages to the wrong address in my neighborhood. We were 398 but FedEx always delivered to 389 or 498. This continued even after we put a second set of house numbers on our mailbox.

We eventually had Amazon ban FedEx as a shipper to our address.

I had complained about LaserShip _so_ many times, and asked them to ban them as a last mile delivery provider - it took a while but finally happened (or, their own delivery vans just became more accessible in the area)

The billing "system" at many large tech companies is a spaghetti of operations processes, third parties, and software. I can imagine that very few (if any) people know how the whole thing works end to end. Edge cases are so often, especially with acquired products, that you get situations like this.

Even in simpler days 1980's when the CFO brought an off the peg Accounts receivable system, that caused problems with the billing system I worked on.

Eventually the system started writing broken BACS tapes and I had to fix the 6-7 months backlog of direct debits.

Neither the Company Secretary or I got even a thank you for fixing the problems.

Ok I did put Jack Scofield's (prominent uk tech journalists) bank account into the red :-)

I'm staggered by how many Fortune 500 companies are still faxing (!yes, faxing!) purchase orders and invoices around.

I'm surprised PDF is the default format for emailed invoices and purchase orders. 99% of the time someone has to key that PDF into another system and most of the time they can't copy and paste anything from the source PDF.

The state of the art is to have OCR of those PDFs to automate it. There's a huge amount of corporate/enterprise solutions that are just working around not doing proper interfaces and integrations. There's even the concept of "Robotic Process Automation" to make working around not being able to deliver working software sound cool.

Yep I use Doc parser as our customers don't want to setup custom EDR.

I can understand that but I can't understand why accounting packages don't have a standardized EDR for Purchase Orders and Invoices.

There are specs out there for example the GS1 spec, anything similar would be great.

In some parts of the world the PDFs get enriched with standardised XML. https://www.ferd-net.de/standards/what-is-zugferd/what-is-zu... (If you bill a government agency in Germany, the PDF has to contain the data in ZUGFeRD format.)

Wow our main supplier is German, and so is our tool supplier. I'll have to look into this.

ZUGFeRD is part of EU's creatively titled eInvoicing [0] project, compatible implementations should exist in other EU countries sooner or later.

[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/eInv...

We don't call them "Piece of Shit" systems for nothing. They've gotten better over time of course, I recall how difficult it was to divide a check with my coworkers when I was just starting my career. But it seems like to some extent PoS only got any kind of love when tablet computers became widely available, and now the pretty iOS device anchored (in the psychological sense) expectations causing the definition of 'adequate' to shift fairly dramatically.

Billing systems are a different beast from point of sale, but it always sounded to me like a similar philosophy ruled both realms.

The systems are messy because the rules, variations, exceptions, etc. that they're attempting to model are also messy. At least that's my experience working on (in part) billing software for an existing, older industry.

This is why you generally do not pay via credit card at the whim of a vendor.

You pay via bank transfer after receiving a bill. A proper, written, paper, tax-legal bill. One that gets a few stamps and signatures by your accounting department, by the department that ordered said software and maybe internal IT. Only then is the transfer issued.

If a vendor cannot be bothered to send a bill properly, well, it isn't worth the hassle. Only hilarity will ensue, as can be seen from the OP.

Then the vendor deletes all your data for having unpaid invoices and you suffer. This isn't what I would call hilarity.

You shouldn't give them your business then.

I agree. If you're at the scale where you require an Enterprise solution, you should also have some level of finance department that knows how to handle purchase orders, invoices, and ledgers of account. This enables transparent vendor account to customer account reconciliation. Credit cards leave everyone in the dark.

Credit cards can also be a ~1% cash back across the board for the business and tools like Brex, Divvy, Airbase, etc... can provide even more spending visibility + budget tracking.

These tools can also offer virtual cards, auto coding of expenses, and spending caps by card.

ACH is better (lower cost) for the vendor but a proper card-based spend mgmt setup might be better for most buyers.

Oh yes, there is no doubt there is monetary incentive to utilize credit cards for the business, and perhaps tools that can help integrate them.

My take is that at an Enterprise level your calculation should be more toward business continuity and chain of custody, rather than squeezing value out of financial instruments that are not your core money-maker.

Why would the bill that's satisfied by a bank transfer be any different from a bill satisfied by a credit card transaction?

Because you have seen the bill before it gets paid. The bill is a precondition for the push-type transaction of sending money. Whereas with a credit card, the vendor can just pull money from the account without ever having sent a proper bill. Just like it happened to the OP. When getting money requires the vendor to get their affairs in order and send proper bills, things will get fixed quickly. When the vendor can get money anyways, things will never be fixed because there is no consequence to cashflow.

Some true salesforce DNA injected there. Few pieces of software left me as frustrated as salesforce

Can you give some examples?

There was one form (to add a customer I think). Really simply deal - 5 text boxes and a create button.

Wouldn't let you click create because its complaining about missing fields (telephone or sector or something).

Except the form literally doesn't have a fields for that stuff.

We also had tons of issues with duplicates because well...global org & suddenly thousands of inexperienced people try to jam stuff on there. So the guy in Egypt links his stuff to Australia because many countries have a "Road Construction Ltd" etc. And then the sales figures pull through cross jurisdication etc. And then the guy in Australia deletes it cause its messing up his dashboard. Just carnage.

TBF I knew our copy of SF was very heavily customized (big contract) & I could sorta see the vision behind it. Perhaps the roll-out was just overly ambitious (bad ERP rollout style) rather than the software inherently bad.

Have you dealt with Oracle?

haha....I knew about the stories, dabbled with their free tier cloud and quickly realized the stories are credible.

e.g. the cloud interface and price list had different SKUs. Much googling later I found some sketchy site that had attempted to map them grid style but still had lots of "???" where they just don't fkin map.

I was ready for per core billing but not that.

The long standing programmer joke was "Yes, enterprise is all about paying more for bloated and buggy software after management is upsold."

Much ink has been spilled over the antipattern of enterprise software arising from procurement failure by having the design focused on pleasing the people who in practice never actually use it.

Billing and collection being out to screw you over is a cliche. Especially the infamous cases when they screw up and hassle you for bills not owed. It appears there was a marriage between the despised.

Not really an "Enterprise" issue. Traditional enterprise companies will be more than happy to make it easy to take your money, absent occasional silly mistakes like invoicing the wrong department, or any department instead of a centralized accounts payable finance department. Although the times I saw that happen where I work was because the department making the purchase put their own address on the vendor's billing system when all purchases are supposed to use the centralized accounts payable address.

From the thread, this seems more like the problems you get with SaaS when it is run with minimal customer service.

Back office and payment settling is hell. No one thinks getting people paid is hard until you actually have to deal with managing 1000's of businesses all with their own turnover of who is responsible for receiving things, all capable of getting bought out or re-org'd at any time.

It's way harder than it looks, but many places don't even think about it in the early stages because they want that core competency built; but they completely miss that being able to send accurate bills and invoices is undeniably core competency. Do not be one of these places, and learn to recognize the warning signs.

Sometimes it can be something as stupid as the invoice ending up in the accounting department's spam folder. Happened to us with one of our services.

We had this with Sendgrid getting our invoices blocked. Sendgrid is no good for delivery of anything other than marketing.

It feels like the future follows the peter principle. We raise the technological level but it's still the same people dealing with new unknowns leading to new kinds of mistakes.

If you are paying market rates for slightly above the competence you need, you are "leaving money on the table."

If you are getting slightly below the competence you need to be effective, and can push the cost of the friction onto your customers, you're coming out ahead of the game.

do you know where to read about such force/dynamics ?

This thread feels like dejavu for me. I had been going through exactly the same with MS Azure couple of years back. MS gave us some Azure free credits and once they expired it was series of stressful months to get the billing going. Constant emails with different layers of support people and no one could help us to PAY for Azure.

I have heard similar stories from customers who switched to us from Okta once Okta IPOed and ignored small self-service sign ups. I wonder if something similar will happen to Auth0 which is (was?) mainly a self-service sign up developer focused company.

(disclosure: worked on a competing product to Auth0 as acmelogin.com)

That does sound very painful and agreed it's a bad way to treat a customer.

BUT the one part I'm confused on: for January - April of 2021, were you actually not billed $4k each month?

If you weren't billed for 4 months, wouldn't you have noticed that when you look at your finances each month?

Note: I'm assuming $4k will be one of your larger monthly expenses as a non-VC startup. And even if $4k/mo isn't a huge expense, making sure it's paid is in the critical path of an essential service you have. Now, I'm not saying that a small (small as in # of employees) startup must verify that each vendor is charging them the correct amount each and every month, but if you had previous pain with them, adding a monthly TODO seems like a good idea to protect your business.

Companies need to start billing back for these screw ups.

If the seller screws up this or that, it's an immediate 10% discount. When it hits the bottom line where the CFO can see it, then it has to be fixed.

Did accounting see the invoice payments getting withdrawn monthly?

ran into similar issues a couple of times - hate doing business with anything that has the label "enterprise" attached to it...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enterprisey

For a short while after the term was coined it even had a Wikipedia page, but it was eventually deleted for not meeting the Notability guidelines. The current Wikipedia page for Enterprise software doesn't even have a hint of criticism of the genre. I did find this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224209

Another good example of one-sided, abusive contracts. The contract fully insulates the seller from all liability while providing no value to the buyer. The only real recourse is if you're big enough to have a legal team to review and amend but that adds a certain amount of overhead

I understand why you would choose Heroku for a small personal project, but can anyone help me understand why a company would choose to use it for core infra?

It seems outrageously overpriced.

They say they never received any notification either.

“There is no cloud - just someone else’s computer”

Ha!

Looks like Salesforce and Heroku have decided to embrace the "Oracle approach".

> Is this what Enterprise mean?

Yes, yes it is!

Why can't these people just create a blog post and link to it? It takes 5 minutes. Blogging is free. You can actually maintain the blog post over time. It doesn't include 50 idiots' snarky comments. (That's what HN is for)

This seems to be a symptom of many acquisitions. Especially during the transition everything goes to hell. And of course meetings to discuss issues are way more important than resolving issues.

As a Java developer, my understanding was that "enterprise" means AbstractFactoryBuilderSingletonInterface.

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