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Is this what enterprise means?
- rblatz 5y agoDid accounting see the invoice payments getting withdrawn monthly?
- bruhhh 5y agowhy is this on the front page? shitpost...
- janlukacs 5y agoran into similar issues a couple of times - hate doing business with anything that has the label "enterprise" attached to it...
- cratermoon 5y agohttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enterprisey 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224209
- steffoz 5y agoThey say they never received any notification either.
- axlee 5y agoSometimes 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.
- xupybd 5y agoWe had this with Sendgrid getting our invoices blocked. Sendgrid is no good for delivery of anything other than marketing.
- cosmotic 5y agoUnrolled: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1389946268764475394.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1389946268764475394.html #hownottousetwitter Summary: Salesforce acquires heroku and alarming billing errors ensue.
- briffle 5y agoAnatomy 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!"
- alunchbox 5y agoRinse and repeat! Too many great products ruined in the pursuit of growth and greed.
- hinkley 5y agoThere'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.
- 5y ago
- tyingq 5y agoNo 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-software/ https://www.salesforce.com/products/sales-cloud/tools/cpq-so...
- throwaway_isms 5y agoThey know better that to risk the suspension of their account and deletion of their data by using a shit service provider.
- yellow_lead 5y agoThe 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.
- Mauricebranagh 5y agoEven 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 :-)
- thrower123 5y agoI'm staggered by how many Fortune 500 companies are still faxing (!yes, faxing!) purchase orders and invoices around.
- xupybd 5y agoI'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.
- pedrocr 5y agoThe 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.
- xupybd 5y ago
- johnvaluk 5y agoThis 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.
- zippergz 5y agoI 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.
- chris_engel 5y agoAnd 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.
- EricE 5y ago“There is no cloud - just someone else’s computer” Ha!
- jollybean 5y agoCompanies 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.
- agumonkey 5y agoIt 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.
- debacle 5y agoIf 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.
- agumonkey 5y agodo you know where to read about such force/dynamics ?
- corty 5y agoThis 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.
- wmf 5y agoThen the vendor deletes all your data for having unpaid invoices and you suffer. This isn't what I would call hilarity.
- binbag 5y agoYou shouldn't give them your business then.
- ajcp 5y agoI 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.
- molsongolden 5y agoCredit 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.
- ajcp 5y agoOh 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.
- commandlinefan 5y agoAs a Java developer, my understanding was that "enterprise" means AbstractFactoryBuilderSingletonInterface.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Havoc 5y agoSome true salesforce DNA injected there. Few pieces of software left me as frustrated as salesforce
- 1cvmask 5y agoCan you give some examples?
- Havoc 5y agoThere 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.
- AceJohnny2 5y agoHave you dealt with Oracle?
- Havoc 5y agohaha....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.
- salawat 5y agoBack 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.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoThis 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.
- 1cvmask 5y agoI 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)
- Nasrudith 5y agoThe 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.
- cptskippy 5y agoThis 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.
- f6v 5y agoThey might have spent more on solving this than your couch was worth.
- cptskippy 5y agoIt 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.
- edmundsauto 5y agoI 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.
- vlovich123 5y agoAnyone know if Apple counted this as the sale of 7 units?
- throwaway823882 5y agoWhy 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)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- forcer 5y agoThis 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.
- entropyneur 5y ago> Is this what Enterprise mean? Yes, yes it is!
- ineedasername 5y agoNot 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.
- tharne 5y agoLooks like Salesforce and Heroku have decided to embrace the "Oracle approach".
- tomhallett 5y agoThat 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.
- diveanon 5y agoI 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.
- nijave 5y agoAnother 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