Another fun fact: from the Canadian tax perspective, a U.S. LLC is taxed as a corporation. If you had your LLC while you were living in Canada you'll need to see what Canadian exposure you have for that.
Thank you for your tips. Can I retroactively subcontract (the books) canadian --> US? That makes a lot of sense, otherwise I think I'm facing a double taxation problem.
A question to get an answer to from your new professional advisor, is, can you reasonably and legitimately treat those payments as personal loans or advances (if paid to you and not paid to third parties), pay these loans back at this point to the Canadian entity, and belatedly contract between Canadian/US entities for services rendered.
You're a couple of years late on getting good advice on business entity structures and relationships...since you've been operating for a while now.
Stripe, Balanced, Braintree, etc all look like much better technical solutions (Apis, ease of integration) than what I use currently, but the pricing is SO prohibitive! Are there any plans for these guys to do Interchange+ pricing, and lower per txn down to a reasonable 10c? At the end of the day, payment processing is a commodity and I'll gladly do the extra work it takes to integrate with a cheaper processor.
We don't have any plans to offer interchange+ pricing. We found that would create more work for our customers. The predicability in pricing is part of the value that Balanced provides.
My biggest obstacle with Sidekiq is communicating back to the frontend client when jobs are done (i.e. credit card processed, FacebookGraph friends cached, etc). Right now I use Pusher (websockets) with a polling fallback, but it's clunky to develop and who likes polling. Does this solution address that at all? If not, what would you do?
My bank required that I could only use a 6 character alphanumeric password when signing up. Kind of scary, but then again, it made me choose a super random PW like v3Ff78 whereas most all people in that situation would use their same password for everything, such as baseball. Thats my theory anyway
Even a "super random" 6-character alphanumeric password is not very secure. A brute force algorithm can try the entire space of 6-character strings very quickly. Hopefully they rate-limit login attempts!
I can't remember what it was, but someone posted here before with a library to help build clean, easy to use API Docs.
The one that looks like a split-pane with examples on one side and details on the other.
I'm a SCUBA instructor (trained and living in Vancouver BC), from Seattle.. and I can definitely attest to the character of pacific northwest divers as being very pro-environment, "protect the wildlife", to the point of craziness. Oh man, I can only imagine the aggressive and passive-aggressive reactions this kid got when he pulled that thing out of the water...
Sure, they're nice creatures. If I had a choice, more often than not I would say let the thing be. But I also own a speargun and hunt on occasion. I like the sport, and it feels good to put your own skills on the table once in a awhile. What irritates me is how irrationally angry people get... it's an act of selfishness, a chance for a relatively passive person to stand up for something. It's not really about the octopus, it's about their beliefs. People have to stand for something... whether that's Obama or an Octopus, it doesn't really matter.
The cool thing about running a company, as I'm sure a lot of people here do, is how quickly you get to see the big picture on the world, and sit in the shoes of everyone else's perspective. Wearing a lot of hats and working on hard things really trains you to only give a shit about things that matter, things you can have an influence on, where the goal is not to change people's opinion subjectively, but to prove, objectively, that you can add value and earn a place on this planet.
Imagine you are one of the engineers behind traffic lights. That's something to be proud of, you've built something that keeps people safer, can allow emergency vehicles to pass through, are centrally controllable, it can do this this and this, EVERYONE knows about them... "Hey I'm the guy that invented the traffic light!"
BUT now look at the "primitive" roundabout. It wins. Something thats simpler, won't fail, and actually keeps people safer.
This is the dilemma I always fight with myself when I build tech solutions to problems: Does this really make it better?
Just because I think its cool, or even that I am proud of it, doesn't mean its good for people to use. For me it always comes down to what is the best. I believe the best in anything is very objective, and that can often lead to very existential questions...
I make software that replaces paper tickets. The battle is always there when someone will say they just want to stick to paper tickets. Sometimes, its hard to disagree with them.
but when a customer pays me money, I start to feel better for awhile. Then the thought is not: 'is this the best solution to this problem'... but rather: 'is this the best thing I am capable of'
Some of the newer gateways (Braintree, Stripe) don't have monthly fees - but there is a tradeoff. Both of those guys have a high per transaction fee (25-30 cents) and also a relatively fixed discount rate (I haven't heard of anyone negotiate it down with volume). They also don't have some of the extra features other gateways offer: ACH/EFT transfers, Interac Online (canada), card-present transactions (lower discount rate), etc.
For example, I use Beanstream (canada), my monthly fee is about $70, but I pay a much lower discount rate (as I can plug in my own merchant account), and my per transaction fee is only 10 cents. When I do 4,500 transactions in one month for a big event, that saves me $900 alone. I can also do automated ACH transfers to my clients (I provide event ticketing software), Interac Online support, and more. My business model is also TPPA (third party payment aggregation) so the risk is much higher. They also have great customer support.
But the $70 does hurt. I think more and more gateways will start to have to offer no monthly fees much like Stripe/Braintree.
Yeah I'm an American who went to school here in Vancouver, started a company, doing well, but probably moving myself and the company back to the States soon as it's very difficult to get a VISA. The new startup VISA only applies to companies that are fundraising.
Just in case this is useful to you one day: A travel visa is a normal, uncapitalized noun "visa". The capital "VISA" is a trademark of the credit card company. Neither is an acronym.
If you finished a post-secondary program you're (probably) entitled to a post-graduate work permit. Beyond that, there's Federal Skilled, Federal CEC programs and BC PNP. Are you sure that you've explored all your options? You may want to talk to an immigration lawyer if you didn't yet.
We're too busy importing people with "masters degrees" from Indian and Chinese "universities". I'm pretty sure this is worth more points than having a degree from even an ivy league school.
