[duxup]

Not even legal issues.

In my experience invoicing, and really all 'printable' documents is the land of "oh someone did something wrong put X on the document". And then again and again and again... And "this is two pages long that's too much" and on and on ...

It's bike shedding insanity with no ideal or end in sight. Every change is arbitrary with no real measure of success.

I swear the only time anyone LOOKs at these documents is to bitch about them.

Oh man and just as if I summoned it someone just sent me a ticket about something on an invoice.

[gamblor956]

Just because you don't understand invoicing doesn't mean that the concerns that appear trivial to you are actually trivial.

From the perspective of someone who works with the people who process the invoices, putting "X on the document" and "two pages long" can be a huge deal when you have to deal with hundreds of invoices or when "X" can mean that an invoice must proceed down a different processing path. These aren't bike shedding concerns; they affect the actual processing of the invoice. In many cases, these concerns affect the validity of the invoice, meaning that the recipient's obligation to pay (or the associated deadline) is not triggered.

And doing something wrong on an invoice is never bikeshedding. An invoice is a legal contract, and in the E.U., an invoice is an unmodifiable document.

[duxup]

They're trivial... when you make the same change to add something, remove it, add it, remove it and hear that it's all being done "because X" and "X" never stops, it's clearly not working and the changes are trivial.

[gamblor956]

No, the changes aren't trivial.

It sounds like you simply don't understand why they're doing it and you just assume that they're trivial because you have no knowledge of the domain.

Off the top of my head, I can thing of a dozen reasons for why they'd require something to be added, then removed, then added, etc., from one invoice to the next.

[BeFlatXIII]

> dozens of reasons

Then why not list them right here, right now?

[gamblor956]

- Changes prompted by common vendor mistakes: DBA vs Legal vs Tax name, Tax vs business ID vs tax account id, projects vs Departments vs Accounts vs Budgets

- Changes prompted by compliance needs: business type (which governs the type and level of compliance required in most jurisdictions), changes to invoicing laws, changes to tax compliance laws

- Changes prompted by business needs: changes to the company's PO/invoicing/expensing process, changes to the company's financial, ERM, or payment processing software or service provider, one-off large expenses that aren't adequately handled by the existing data form; changes to financial modeling

- Changes prompted by marketing: new logo, design, or template

- Changes prompted by legal: new court rulings, etc., affecting legal's approval of the existing template(s)

- Changes prompted by employees: form is too complicated, form is not complicated enough, form doesn't capture my department or project's needs

The problem with an all inclusive form is that it is too complicated for most vendors and they end up filling it in wrong (requiring several rounds of review by the payor company), but too simple a form and you end up needing to make a lot of changes like the one the parent was talking about.

You could do multiple templates, but that just multiplies the work, and makes it more difficult for employees to figure out which template they should be using, and so they'll all end up using whatever random template they find first leading back to the One True Template and you're back to square one again.

And yes, all of the examples above are based on real life examples.

[duxup]

> It sounds like you simply don't understand why they're doing it

I don’t know why you would think that considering I work with them and you do not…

[gamblor956]

I work with the A/R and A/P teams all the time. It's a large part of doing tax in-house.