4 ms·

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) peop

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.

Mauricebranagh 6y ago
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 :-)
thrower123 6y ago
I'm staggered by how many Fortune 500 companies are still faxing (!yes, faxing!) purchase orders and invoices around.
- xupybd 6y ago
  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.
  - pedrocr 6y ago
    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.
    - xupybd 6y ago
      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.
  - noAnswer 6y ago
    In some parts of the world the PDFs get enriched with standardised XML. https://www.ferd-net.de/standards/what-is-zugferd/what-is-zugferd.html 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.)
    - xupybd 6y ago
      Wow our main supplier is German, and so is our tool supplier. I'll have to look into this.
    - DCoder 6y ago
      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/eInvoicing https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/eInv...
hinkley 6y ago
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.
jvolkman 6y ago
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.

Mauricebranagh 6y ago

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 :-)

thrower123 6y ago

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

xupybd 6y ago
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.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  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.
  - xupybd 6y ago
    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.
- noAnswer 6y ago
  In some parts of the world the PDFs get enriched with standardised XML. https://www.ferd-net.de/standards/what-is-zugferd/what-is-zugferd.html 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.)
  - xupybd 6y ago
    Wow our main supplier is German, and so is our tool supplier. I'll have to look into this.
  - DCoder 6y ago
    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/eInvoicing https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/eInv...

hinkley 6y ago

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.

jvolkman 6y ago

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.