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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

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.

zippergz 5y ago
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.
- chris_engel 5y ago
  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.
  - salawat 5y ago
    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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - heipei 5y ago
    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.
    - bcrosby95 5y ago
      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.
      - marcosdumay 5y ago
        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.
- binbag 5y ago
  So who decided to get "new leadership"?
  - zippergz 5y ago
    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.
hinkley 5y ago
> 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.
- Animats 5y ago
  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.
chromaton 5y ago
Business idea: billing system for enterprise SaaS software.
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  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.
driverdan 5y ago
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.
- mattmanser 5y ago
  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.

zippergz 5y ago

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.

chris_engel 5y ago
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.
- salawat 5y ago
  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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- heipei 5y ago
  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.
  - bcrosby95 5y ago
    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.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      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.
binbag 5y ago
So who decided to get "new leadership"?
- zippergz 5y ago
  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.

hinkley 5y ago

> 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.

Animats 5y ago
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.

chromaton 5y ago

Business idea: billing system for enterprise SaaS software.

1cvmask 5y ago
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.

driverdan 5y ago

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.

mattmanser 5y ago
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.