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Comment by peterldowns | Hacker News Reader

Billing and Accounts Payable will always seem like a "how could you mess that up?" problem to engineers, but it literally is difficult and complicated and rife with ways to very seriously and permanently fuck your relationship with your customer. And potentially with your auditors, investors, and whoever performs legal oversight in your jurisdiction. All of the largest companies in the tech world have been hit by AP fraud. Billing, collecting taxes, etc. is just fundamentally complicated (fundamentally = by laws of the lands.) There's a reason Stripe is a bazillion dollar business!

That said, this screams of amateur hour. If Fisker can't keep track of the money I certainly wouldn't trust them to build a car correctly.

EDIT: I didn't realize they were already a public company. How in the fuck did they pull that off? It's so over for them.

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> Billing and Accounts Payable will always seem like a "how could you mess that up?" problem to engineers, but it literally is difficult and complicated and rife with ways to very seriously and permanently fuck your relationship with your customer

Yep.

Over the years I've seen some pretty crazy payment related errors that you can't think is possible, like a 12+ year old publicly traded company who generates $60 million dollars a year and their business model is a platform that lets other people sell products, in other words their customers have their own customers and buying things with money through a hosted checkout page is a focal point of their business.

One bug was during this checkout flow:

    - Open checkout page for product A and see a buy price of $99
    - Open a new tab and visit product B's checkout page and see a buy price of $199
    - Switch back to the first tab and buy product A for $99
    - You get charged $199 and credited for purchasing product B

I was only the end user of such a system so I don't know what their code looked like but I'm guessing their checkout page had stuff stored in a session and the last page loaded new data in the session but it didn't match what was shown on the checkout page. That's a massive assumption but that's how I imagine it happened.

Why wouldn't you do the reverse bug on the checkout flow? You'd at least gain

No, as described at least, you'd always get the product you paid for. Just not necessarily the one you wanted.

Believe it or not, I have seen the same problem on an insurance website for a very large insurance company. The issue was that the developers were storing the rates in session variables and so when you open a new product in a separate tab with a different rate, it would overwrite the session variables with the rates for the newly opened product.

Then when the user went to the previous tab to purchase the product they ended up buying it at the rate for the product opened in the new tab.

It is amazing that this mistake wasn't caught for a long, long time.

I hope they didn’t store the literal rate, but only the selected product id, in the session. Otherwise, you could just modify your request and set a low rate…

Nope. They stored a WHOLE RANGE of fields which was also used to display the rates directly to the customers. A total mess!

Yeah, I had this problem with the world's only ultra-low-cost airline.

We were working on an analytics system and this sortof stuff was pervasive. The entire frontend basically didn't handle multiple tabs.

Mind you, this was in 2012, I assume they've fixed it by now.

Fisker became a public company through a SPAC, which allows them to conveniently sidestep a lot of procedures than an IPO would entail.

Ahhhhhh of course. Thanks, that makes sense.

For things to get this far is a failure of accounting. Engineering may have set the stage, but it's accounting's job to respond appropriately rather than letting (or not seeing) this play out. Treating accounting unseriously is an extremely obvious, avoidable mistake that a mindboggling number of businesses make. A substantial portion of the finance and accounting industry thrives on cleaning up the outcome of accounting being pawned off on the owner's spouse / kid / niece / nephew. They'll figure it out, right? It's just math.

I was thinking, surely it can't be that stupid in this case, but then I checked. Who knows, maybe Geeta Gupta-Fisker really is a profoundly skilled financial wizard. The founder's / chairman's / CEO's spouse is always the wrong person to be managing finances for so very many reasons. At the very least the optics of undermining of a firewall between accounting and equity undermines trust in finance. Such a relationship inspires extra special attention from auditors and regulators when mistakes happen. It's a clear sign that leadership doesn't take accounting as seriously as they should. Yet nepotism keeps being a normal thing that happens often.

> Billing and Accounts Payable will always seem like a "how could you mess that up?" problem

After owning five businesses, I agree with this. When I do due diligence on a company before investing, I can usually tell if it is worth investing in by looking at their billing practices, billing reporting and AR aging and history. Good businesses are machines for trading money for whatever they sell. Billing is core functionality.

I feel like the concept that keeping track of numbers, particularly with distributed sources and sinks, is hard would actually be very intuitive to engineers.

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