Many years ago I led a billing team at Yahoo! responsible for billing for premium services in European markets.
My team existed for the sole reason that the European business did not trust that the US payment services team understood European needs, and the "invoice is a legal document" thing was one of them. I spent so many meetings repeating to the US team that no, we could not switch to their invoicing as long as a new software release might retroactively change the template used to show already issued invoices (e.g. the registered office might change, or the VAT number).
We didn't have to deal with printed invoices thankfully, but we did ensure we produced each invoice once and stored it, so that the European finance team could sleep at night.
At the time Yahoo! had 8 different payment platforms. Some of those were due to weirdness around acquisitions and Japan (which was a joint venture), but apart from mine I believe two others also existed because of local weirdness that the local businesses decided it was safest not to let Yahoo! US mess with.
At the time I left, after 3 years of that, we'd managed to get agreements to migrate a few bits and pieces to the US after they'd shown the understood requirements for specific features, but it was like pulling teeth.
I'm Anh-Tho, one of a co-founders of Lago, thanks for your comment!
I was the country manager of France for a US Sequoia-backed company before, and I never ever managed to convince HQ to work on EU invoicing, I think they just did not want to open the pandora box you just described!
My team existed for the sole reason that the European business did not trust that the US payment services team understood European needs, and the "invoice is a legal document" thing was one of them. I spent so many meetings repeating to the US team that no, we could not switch to their invoicing as long as a new software release might retroactively change the template used to show already issued invoices (e.g. the registered office might change, or the VAT number).
We didn't have to deal with printed invoices thankfully, but we did ensure we produced each invoice once and stored it, so that the European finance team could sleep at night.
At the time Yahoo! had 8 different payment platforms. Some of those were due to weirdness around acquisitions and Japan (which was a joint venture), but apart from mine I believe two others also existed because of local weirdness that the local businesses decided it was safest not to let Yahoo! US mess with.
At the time I left, after 3 years of that, we'd managed to get agreements to migrate a few bits and pieces to the US after they'd shown the understood requirements for specific features, but it was like pulling teeth.