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 & 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 - Accounting & taxSeptember 6, 2026
The numbers we invented belonged to no one
The numbers we generated had the right digit count and a valid check digit. Even so, 12 of our 41 test cases stopped. What the office was looking at was not the shape of the number but whether anyone owned it.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 5, 2026
The paper already says what you owe
Reading the Philippine rules showed me that the single field in our books for whether you are registered for value added tax cannot produce an answer. Two businesses of the same size in the same trade can sit in different regimes, depending on a choice.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 4, 2026
The rule we wrote in 2 places
One set of books had 2 invoices carrying the same number. The place that decides the shape of a number and the place that decides when it resets were written separately, and in June I changed only one of them. Between 1 July and 20 August, 58 invoices collided.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 3, 2026
A field you can type in is a permission
It started with 1 line: please remove the PPN field. We did not remove it — we stopped it being typed by hand. Of 449 sets of books that are not registered for PPN, 37 had put a number in that field, and in 9 of them the number was withholding tax.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 2, 2026
Every table wanted a different press
Some of our tables open wherever you press the row; some work only on the text. One line from a teammate sent me counting: 10 list screens, 4 different conventions. Going back over 3 months of messages, I found 6 reports we had misread.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxSeptember 1, 2026
The day it said Disimpan
On the afternoon of 14 August, Coretax accepted a file we had generated, for the first time. It had rejected us 27 times before that. Here is every place we fell over.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post