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Comment by yellow_lead | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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.

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