Accounting problems for AOL? from www.adultnetsurprise.com

"It's like you think that they'd have the best accounting firms and books (and auditing) for all the $$$ they are taking in, but it seems like some of these places have the worst accounting."

This AOHell story is interesting: http://www.iht.com/articles/77138.html

or more specifically: "... in August that $49 million in ad sales at its America Online Internet service may have been booked improperly."

Why is that so many big companies have accounting problems? It's like you think that they'd have the best accounting firms and books (and auditing) for all the $$$ they are taking in, but it seems like some of these places have the worst accounting.

Comments?

Billing and customer loyalty from www.adultnetsurprise.com

"But sometimes it's the principle of the way big companies treat their long standing customers that irk me"

Speaking of earthlink ...

Got an email from them the other day that if I didn't pay my bill they were going to interupt our service.

We've been with them since early 1998 on a single dialup account (yes, we have other ISPs and other connection methods) and they have been taking money out of our account every month for this time. We've never paid from an invoice so I didn't really understand what they were talking about.

Well about 3 months ago they suddenly changed our billing and starting invoicing us by mail and charging us an extra $1 for this "service".

We caught this extra charge and called them up (expect to wait a minimum of 20 minutes when calling Earthlink) and said, "mmm, we don't need to know after 4+ years being with you how much you are taking out of our account. We can review the statement and adjust our records accordingly."

They apologized and removed the $1 extra charge and said our account was "back to normal"

About a week later I get an email -- it was one of those mass emails that you sometimes get from your ISP -- that "earthlink discovered they had" made a mistake and changed a bunch of people's accounts to force hardcopy mail bills.

Nothing personalized of course.

I sort of thought to myself how many others didn't see this $1 charge? lol Yeah, I know, it's only a buck, big deal, right? But sometimes it's the principle of the way big companies treat their long standing customers that irk me. I mean you start mulitplying $1 times a large amount and you end up with something substantial.

Then the next month went by fine and then this last month, come to find out, they stopped taking the money out of our account altogether.

So a month goes by and of course they weren't paid so they decide that now they'll let us know they are getting ready to shut down the connection over what amounted to 20 bones and some change.

So we call back and again after 20 minutes of waiting on hold, a friendly guy comes on and explains that they erased our account information and they had no way to bill us any more.

Now I'm thinking: but wouldn't the most logical thing be to write and say to a customer who has paid faithfully for over 4 years: "We made a mistake and erased your billing. Could we please get the information again?"

Where's the customer loyalty?

Not send us some damn form letter that says we are going to shut you down for not paying. I mean, it took the guy like 10 seconds to realize they screwed up when we brought it to their attention.

But maybe this is just too logical lol

On a positive note, they did credit us "one month service" for our trouble which was cool and we're staying with them of course, but I think this is a good example of when the size of an operation gets too big and the machinery goes too far.

There's still people, human beings, behind that long series of account numbers.

TD Scripts.com now offering PayPal as trial payment option from www.ynotmasters.com

"So far our experience has been a positive one, but it is much too early to tell how things will turn out with them"

After months of checking into PayPal, we just started using them very recently. So far our experience has been a positive one, but it is much too early to tell how things will turn out with them.

We heard lots of good and bad feedback when checking into their rep with webmasters and other online sources and finally decided to give them a try.

BTW, I think it's a good thing that PayPal has started depositing balances into FDIC insured bank accounts.

Though PayPal might not want to think of themselves -- or be classified officially -- as a "bank" -- we're sort of using them as one lol. I've talked to several other webmasters who are doing the same, keeping a balance in there and simply transferring money around through their service when applicable.

At least now we can answer to the affirmative to people when they ask, "Do you take PayPal?"