To be fair, in this case, the author was tracking his KPIs, and those suggested that all was hunky dory, but what he wasn’t tracking were the actual payments being received against invoices that never converted to an open state. In this case, the invoices were left in a draft state on Stripe’s side. And who could’ve expected that they’d need to occasionally check for draft invoices?

It seems like it wasn’t made clear in the docs that invoices aren’t finalized in these circumstances until later.

This sounds like something good old fashioned double-entry bookkeeping would have caught immediately (hunky dory income from Stripe seemingly falling into a black hole). No need to scrutinize every transaction until you notice the ledger isn't adding up.

Double entry booking would have shown a growing accounting accounts receivable and an undersized cash account. Sure, you might dig into why that is, but it wouldn't leap out.

Heck, in many ways, double entry bookkeeping on the accrual basis would be less likely to notice it.

It sounds like a classic example of how accrual bookkeeping can be misleading due to timing issues (the sale has already been booked even though the cash hasn’t been collected). I know it has other advantages vs. cash bookkeeping, but cash is so much easier to understand that I have always chosen it whenever possible (i.e., for a service business).

If you have the data, either form of bookkeeping should be 'just' a shift in presentation?

(I don't know whether the software used makes this easy?)

Yes, a lot of software can toggle between them via a trivial UI toggle

Thanks!

Btw, you could also fit this into the conceptual framework of accrual accounting, if you modelled counterparty risk.

Could you? I thought accrual methods weren't allowed to think about future probabilities and had to decide on whether to recognize an event or not. I mean, if you had counterparty risk insurance, that would make sense. So I guess if you treated yourself as self insured, you would could create the same accounting treatment?

I don't know about what's legally allowed or not. (Might also depend on jurisdiction.)

From what I remember, in general you have to recognize outlays with certainty, but you have more leeway in how you treat inflows.

In general, you can also keep whatever you want in your books and run them however you like; you just have a legal obligation to also keep accounts that are in line with established standards.

You see this distinction in GAAP vs non-GAAP numbers in the US, where GAAP stands for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

In banking there's an obligation to model counterparty risk; but I have to assume that banks keep multiple copies of their balance sheets and accounts around:

One version for eg tax purposes, and another version for things like determining capital requirements and risk exposure; if different rules apply in the different domains.

Depending on the process, maybe. I don’t know the landscape of accounting integrations with Stripe, but I probably wouldn’t want to sync a Stripe draft invoice as an open invoice to my accounting app. If there’s no open invoice, there’s no reference in the GL, and there’s nothing to be caught apart from an informal ‘cash flow seems to have taken a hit’.

It’d take both an open invoice and running an A/R aging to catch this one, which isn’t implicit in double-entry accounting.

I don’t think it would. All the invoices were left in a Draft state, so I don’t think that appears on your ledger. You’d have to look at your list of Draft invoices to see it going up and up.

That feels weird to me. If some dashboard is telling me "nice, your revenue is growing!", but the money actually flowing into the bank account doesn't look right, I'm going to investigate. Immediately. I'm not going to just trust those metrics when the actual real-world measure doesn't match.

What is weird is how their accounting software didn't raise 5 different alerts when they have AR outside of their due dates. I have a small business and mine raises alerts all over the place when something slips the due date for AR.

Is it just me thinking this is actually crazy that they didn't notice even through a quarter closing? One could argue they're a small business but then how does the business not notice multiple months of AR being delayed.

> The SaaS GUIs sort of work for the high level stuff but there's way too much information to decode the Business.

> You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code.

> All I see is up and coming salespeople, valuable customers, strategic products.

> You want a drink?

Poring over individual transactions sounds like a terrible, if not impossible, way to identify aggregate trends

You’re absolutely right and to be clear, my dad also pours over data roll-ups, charts, etc., but he’s never stopped looking at receipts. It’s a habit he’s had since the 70s. Back in the day, he used these electro-mechanical cash registers that had very loud typewriter-like receipt printers. At the end of the day, the manager would run the journal and my dad—-in his office across the store—tell you what kind of a sales day it was simply by listening to the sound of the register doing the end-of-day sequence.

There's a persistent meme on HN that it's straightforward to make a business that "runs on autopilot", with no human intervention. I'll admit that such a business is possible, but I'm deeply skeptical of the durability of such a business.

I'd much rather bet on a business owner like your dad, who's deeply involved. Sounds like your dad's receipt reading was a great habit to have, and paid dividends far outside of just "making sure things were running OK on a daily basis".

LOL, it's true. The idea of the quick exit is also part of the HN culture and I think that would be very foreign to people like my dad. People who build small but profitable, businesses and run them for the long-term are underappreciated in the tech world. I don't know about you but if I was building a SaaS, I'd be looking for the tech equivalent of In-n-Out Burger: something you build and spend most of your time making sure that it does the same thing consistently for years on end, and just enjoy the profits and dependability.

I'm right there with you. I've been building and running a job board for the last few months, and I'm hoping it becomes my own little SW equivalent of an In-N-Out. It's profitable, and slowly growing, so it's moving in the right direction.

Someday it'll be my own personal Double Double Animal Style.

Most of the time, the brain does this better than any machine.

That's why we don't have self-driving cars yet.

Unless you're Kim Peek you're not doing inventory or trends in your head.

Then you underestimate the human ability to recognize patterns.