HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you handle invoices and purchase orders?

11 points by gottebp ↗ HN
For my small business I have searched high and low for a way to simplify purchase orders and invoices. After a few years I am at whits end here, and hoping HN can lend some insight.

On one hand we have numerous solutions for direct purchasing such as Stripe, Gumroad, etc. These are fully automated and a breeze working well for B2C transactions.

On the other hand other enterprises and government institutions skip right over that automation and typically reach out by email requesting purchase orders with invoicing. Requests like "Net-45" are common. It seems that for accrual-method accounting purposes it is extremely painful for them to just use the digital purchase form and enter a credit card.

Running a ramen-profitable small business though, it is hard to justify devoting a full time employee to this problem. In this world of small startups, has anyone found a way to automate thes B2B transactions -- even partially?

A side note: I occasionally work with software resellers, and find that even they want to do everything manually on both ends of the sale. If they would simply use the digital payment form on my end to abstract the manual work for me, I would happily grant a major discount -- and yet that is not how it goes. Manual emails to both their client and to my sales contact are the norm! Resellers seem uniquely poised to deal with this difficulty (and deserve a discount) and yet they do not take it up! Is there a good reason to keep everything manual like this? Help!

5 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 19.1 ms ] thread
nocubicles
Well I guess they are sending you purchase orders and requesting invoices because they cannot use credit card because of corporate rules(accounting, policies etc).

Its possible to automate this. You should use some ERP system or even accounting system. You could read automatically the purchase orders they send to you and create sales order's, deliveries and invoices in the ERP system.

Are you even using accounting system? Maybe the software you are using has the possibilities to create this kind of integration?

jasonkester
“We’re happy to accept payment via purchase order for customers on the Enterprise plan, with an annual commitment.”

That is, if you want to use a purchase order to pay for our $10/month service, yes we can do that. It will cost $3,600.

Some organisations realise at that point that they can in fact pay with a credit card after all. Others accept that they are in fact an Enterprise for the simple reason that that is how they behave. Those ones are used to this happening and generally move forward.

osrec
Hi there, we may potentially have a solution ready for you in a couple of months (in private beta currently). Do you have a bit of time to chat about your specific requirements? If yes, my email address is in my profile :)
ezekg
Stripe allows you to set an invoice to “manual payment”, and they also allow the option to pay via ACH bank transfer. Stripe sends them the invoice via email, they click a link to a payment page hosted by Stripe, and they enter their bank info. Simple.