Thread by @troyhunt

We often receive comments to the effect of “we want to purchase a @haveibeenpwned subscription but our company doesn’t allow us to use a credit card”. What is the financial reason behind this?

This is a very small portion compared to those that *do* pay by card, but why is this?

To add to this, having spent 14 years at Pfizer I’d see policies like this all the time. But it’s also not like there was a blanket ban: try going on a business trip and asking the person at the noodle shop you’re having lunch at to raise an invoice on 60 day terms 🤣

This also isn’t about traceability; spend the money, raise an expense claim with receipt, job done. I could understand if the answer was “because an invoice and wire transfer stops people randomly being stuff and puts procurement in control”, but they could still pay with a card.

Here's the complete kludgy mess this makes for us: as an Australian company, we can't accept wire transfers via @Stripe and the only ways to achieve this involves registering a US-entity which we *really* don't want to do. That scenario is just nuts - it shouldn't be this hard.

@stripe So, we end up referring people to resellers (and often they're required by the company anyway) which then costs them more money, more time and more mucking around on our end. The whole simple workflow of "enter card, get service" dies and becomes a complete mess.

@stripe But again, empirically we're talking a very small percentage of all purchases (definitely single-digit), whilst this creates the vast bulk of support overhead for us (definitely >80%). It's an incommensurate amount of effort for what appears to be just corporate bureaucracy.

@stripe And I wonder - of that small single-digit percentage, how many would suddenly find a way if it was the only way? Not all, but some...

Ok, I feel better now, thank you for reading 😊