Notes from the founder
Occasional notes from the KAZENA team — Taro and the people building alongside him — about Indonesia, the Philippines, and running a small business here.
- Accounting & taxOctober 3, 2026
We rebuilt the ground under the same zero 3 times without changing a line
Between 29 September and 1 October we rebuilt the ground under a single zero 3 times — the withheld tax for the year of two employees whose income stayed under the threshold. Not one line of our output changed; what changed was the grade of the evidence that let us say the zero was fine.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 30, 2026
We turned what we checked on one form into a rule for five
On 23 September V wrote to say a person was missing from the monthly file. The cause was a rule we had checked once, on the annual form, and then let take effect on all 5 forms.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 27, 2026
The missing address field was not something we forgot to build
I spent the afternoon of 18 September building a field to print an address onto the annual certificate. That field is not in the product. The annual form has no Alamat column at all, and the address that gets printed is the one registered with the tax office.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 24, 2026
What arrived was not a bug report but a redesign of the payslip
On 12 September, what E sent was not a bug report. It was a hand-drawn layout for rebuilding the payslip, and it showed that we had been making that sheet for the wrong reader.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 21, 2026
The tax printed on a receipt was not tax we could subtract
Of the 41 pieces of paper I photographed in Jakarta, 2 carried a faktur pajak number. The tax printed on the rest was being recorded by our software as tax we could subtract.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 17, 2026
We hid the field, and the 1 sentence describing it stayed
On the settings screen of a test account switched to the Philippines, 1 sentence had stayed behind: the faktur pajak number is 16 digits. We had fenced the field correctly by country, and only the sentence describing that field was outside the fence.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 14, 2026
The 64,000,000 in the official sample was an amount nobody paid
For about 3 weeks I took the 64,000,000 inside the official sample of the annual form for a real figure. That file was a sample a machine had generated from the schema: the shape was exact, and the numbers inside were amounts nobody had ever paid.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 11, 2026
We folded the 5 rows that worked, and they read as gone
The import preview was built to list only the rows that needed attention. On a file of 6 rows just 1 appeared, and the other 5 read as having vanished.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 10, 2026
One line said: anywhere but Japan, return 0
Only the entries saved from a photograph were throwing the input tax away, folding the whole tax-inclusive amount into the expense. The cause was 1 line I wrote when the country branch went in: if it is not Japan, return 0.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 9, 2026
We wrote “estimated” on every field
Above the receipt reading we wrote 1 line: this content was estimated by AI. The fields we called estimates were the certain ones, and the fields we had actually decided ourselves carried no mark at all.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 8, 2026
Choosing the form was never the user's job
At the top of the screen we had lined up 4 abbreviations: BPMP, BP21, BPPU, BPA1. Someone asked which one to choose, and the question showed that making anyone choose was the mistake.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 7, 2026
The time we were spending was hers
At the end of August I counted the times she had tested for us. The number was 22. This is a note about what we can return to someone who gives us her time for nothing, starting with what we have not returned yet.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post