Is this what enterprise means?

This is common in the Enterprise and makes me wonder how many companies are undermined by their own accounting&#x2F;billing departments. Typical problems include:<p>1) Vendor agrees to to NET 60, but begins to display warnings to end users on day 30.<p>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&#x27;s payment system, with no exceptions or alternatives.<p>3) Vendor does not have a method to process payment for multiple invoices combined in one check.<p>4) Vendor sends invoice to wrong account at the same enterprise (way too common).<p>What&#x27;s frustrating about these examples is that there is no sales pitch needed; we&#x27;ve already decided to purchase the product. Taking our money shouldn&#x27;t be the hardest part.

Unrolled: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threadreaderapp.com&#x2F;thread&#x2F;1389946268764475394.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threadreaderapp.com&#x2F;thread&#x2F;1389946268764475394.html</a><p>#hownottousetwitter<p>Summary: Salesforce acquires heroku and alarming billing errors ensue.

No dashboard, invoice amounts don&#x27;t add to the total, etc. Doesn&#x27;t Salesforce dogfood their own stuff? They have a billing product:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.salesforce.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;sales-cloud&#x2F;tools&#x2F;cpq-software&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.salesforce.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;sales-cloud&#x2F;tools&#x2F;cpq-so...</a>

This sounds like a less funny version of the time I ordered a couch off Amazon.<p>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.<p>Each time I spoke to Amazon I was given a $75 credit. I still have never been charged for my 1 couch.

The billing &quot;system&quot; 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.

This is why you generally do not pay via credit card at the whim of a vendor.<p>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.<p>If a vendor cannot be bothered to send a bill properly, well, it isn&#x27;t worth the hassle. Only hilarity will ensue, as can be seen from the OP.

Some true salesforce DNA injected there. Few pieces of software left me as frustrated as salesforce

The long standing programmer joke was &quot;Yes, enterprise is all about paying more for bloated and buggy software after management is upsold.&quot;<p>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.<p>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.

Not really an &quot;Enterprise&quot; 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&#x27;s billing system when all purchases are supposed to use the centralized accounts payable address.<p>From the thread, this seems more like the problems you get with SaaS when it is run with minimal customer service.

Back office and payment settling is hell. No one thinks getting people paid is hard until you actually have to deal with managing 1000&#x27;s of businesses all with their own turnover of who is responsible for receiving things, all capable of getting bought out or re-org&#x27;d at any time.<p>It&#x27;s way harder than it looks, but many places don&#x27;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.

Sometimes it can be something as stupid as the invoice ending up in the accounting department&#x27;s spam folder. Happened to us with one of our services.

It feels like the future follows the peter principle. We raise the technological level but it&#x27;s still the same people dealing with new unknowns leading to new kinds of mistakes.

This 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.

I 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.<p>(disclosure: worked on a competing product to Auth0 as acmelogin.com)

That does sound very painful and agreed it&#x27;s a bad way to treat a customer.<p>BUT the one part I&#x27;m confused on: for January - April of 2021, were you actually not billed $4k each month?<p>If you weren&#x27;t billed for 4 months, wouldn&#x27;t you have noticed that when you look at your finances each month?<p>Note: I&#x27;m assuming $4k will be one of your larger monthly expenses as a non-VC startup. And even if $4k&#x2F;mo isn&#x27;t a huge expense, making sure it&#x27;s paid is in the critical path of an essential service you have. Now, I&#x27;m not saying that a small (small as in # of employees) startup <i>must</i> 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.

Companies need to start billing back for these screw ups.<p>If the seller screws up this or that, it&#x27;s an immediate 10% discount. When it hits the bottom line where the CFO can see it, then it has to be fixed.

Did accounting see the invoice payments getting withdrawn monthly?

ran into similar issues a couple of times - hate doing business with anything that has the label &quot;enterprise&quot; attached to it...

Another 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&#x27;re big enough to have a legal team to review and amend but that adds a certain amount of overhead

I 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?<p>It seems outrageously overpriced.

They say they never received any notification either.

“There is no cloud - just someone else’s computer”<p>Ha!

Looks like Salesforce and Heroku have decided to embrace the &quot;Oracle approach&quot;.

&gt; Is this what Enterprise mean?<p>Yes, yes it is!

Why can&#x27;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&#x27;t include 50 idiots&#x27; snarky comments. (That&#x27;s what HN is for)

This 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.

As a Java developer, my understanding was that &quot;enterprise&quot; means AbstractFactoryBuilderSingletonInterface.