superhog_personal_notes/invoicing_comeback

Invoicing Comeback

As of today (Dec 23) the invoicing process is a mess. It's terribly manual, not elegant at all, it's causing a lot of troubles and is putting the company at risk.

Everyone agrees on it, yet we still need to put a solution in place. The Data Team has been asked to step in and help. This repository aggregates contents on this issue.

Content index

• FW Payments and Invoicing process.msg: some contents sent by Elaine, including Excel sheets they use to merge and process data.
• step_files: the Excel sheets mentioned above.
• Invoicing flow chart: a flow chart built by Ben C. with the different steps: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVMirYfDg=/

My notes on the video

My notes when watching through the video Ben C. recorded with the Finance team. Link to the video: https://guardhog-my.sharepoint.com/✌️/g/personal/ben_cotte_superhog_com/EXMpEnpXVmpErLmDedCxpyEBMbYKS4lezEp_gihbbSfsxg?e=eVFhxM

• Jamie has the task of calculating the waivers (can this be divided into a subprocess?)
  • Data is exported out of PowerBI and Acquired and "validated". There are inconsistencies between both sources and the team manually fixes them.
    • What are in the inconsistencies? Why do they happen?
    • If Acquired is the source of truth, why bother export the PowerBI data?
    • Which PowerBI is it exactly? What exact table gets exported?
    • With this, waivers are calculated and payments are reconciled.
  • Some manual information needs to be obtained through the dashboard
    • Which?
    • How can we get it out of the backend without having to go through the UI? Can I make a nice query to fetch this out instead?
  • Info also gets manually searched for in Hubspot and the Acquired dashboard.
  • So, what's not really in PowerBI?
    • Manual refunds
    • Chargebacks
    • Errors 262 from Acquired (PowerBI considers it as paid even though it isn't)
    • Sometimes the payment is simply not in Dashboard at all, so it doesn't appear in PBI.
• Manually convert the currencies (Can I lookup some small excel wizardry to make this simple for them???)
• There are Payment Requests that get manually generated by the Customer Service team in Stripe and sent to customers out-of-process if Acquired fails.
  • Records in Stripe about who the host is, what the booking is, need to be checked manually from the UI
• From Hubspot
  • Get the new clients and pricing structure there
  • Client names in Hubspot and Dashboard are different

Some random thoughts:

• I feel a lot of negativity in the meeting. Everything is deemed hard and not doable. "We are doomed and that's it."
• Would all of these PBI exports be simplified by having direct queries to the databases?
• It feels like Dashboard is not 100% perfectly synced with the Payment Providers?

Fronts:

• Quickish
  • Ease data export from dashboard with tailored queries
  • Formalize things and win spreadsheet agility by simply formalizing and documenting things
  • Somehow make nicer exports from Acquired and/or Stripe
• Longish
  • Remove manual payments from process limbo. We need some degree of organization around there, even if the first version is just a well maintained shared spreadsheet.
  • Single payment processor
  • Integrate payment processor data into a database of ours. Dashboard backend if it makes sense, DWH if it doesn't. Join with Dashboard data.