@Christopher Chavez
In an effort to use our Thursday time wisely, I want to offer the following wish for our meeting. I don't believe in manifesting... but let's see if we can get some of Zack's recent burning man magic to rub off on our trio... so we can manifest a great collaboration and solid way forward. These are the basics:
- Ideally, a member of Finance - you - will define what great looks like with regard to auto invoicing.
- Based on your defined ideal, Engineering (Zack) can share what limitations we have because of data, if any.
- Based on your defined ideal, Product (Chris) can share / inquire about limitations we have to grapple with because of workflows, if any.
- Based on communicated limitations, if any, we determine if we have to change approaches or stick with the one we have.
With regard to auto invoicing, how do the above basics apply to where we now find ourselves?
- Finance needs to confirm for Engineering and Product any auto invoicing errors due to exceptions versus errors that are happening where they should not.
- We need to determine if we de-couple outcomes that can be decoupled. For example, we can (though we may not want) to de couple auto invoicing from whether we start from a zero'd out account balance.
- We need to determine if the billing page (that displays invoice data) meets the need for Finance as well as Clients looking at their account's billing data. Basic question: does the new billing page communicate clearly? Part of this clear communication relates to how we are sharing a client's usage line item breakdown in the app. We look forward to sharing how this looks and hearing feedback.
All of these pieces are part of the same story: make invoicing boring. Or, make invoicing super clear that it's not controversial.
@Natalie Boustani
- ideal run of auto-invoicing:
- on BD 5, invoices are automatically generated based on the previous period closed
- before invoices are sent, there is a check mechanism that occurs to ensure the total makes sense and is accurate (for now, this can be the OM, but ideally, no person is doing this check)
- once that is confirmed, invoice is automatically sent to all emails in billing emails of Stripe
- backups data is accessible directly from the email received and matches 100% with the invoice balance
The ideal is for this to not require any human interaction.