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 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 - Accounting & taxAugust 31, 2026
The gate we never wrote
A feature we listed in the paid column had no plan check in the code at all. For 130 days it has been running on free accounts exactly as it does on paid ones. We did not take it back — we made it free and corrected the price page instead.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxAugust 30, 2026
Too ordinary for anyone to mention
Today marks 1 month in Jakarta. Almost everything useful I have learned here appears in no manual — not hidden, just too ordinary for anyone to think of saying. The invoice we were printing was not yet a document in this country.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxAugust 29, 2026
Our year-to-date began where our records did
The field labelled year-to-date was counting only the payments recorded in our own ledger. Across 23 ledgers that started partway through the year, the withholding falls short by 41,200,000 rupiah in total.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxAugust 28, 2026
Whose today was it
Our server changes its date 7 hours before Jakarta does. For those 7 hours, what a person entered as today we stored as yesterday. 488 entries of it, and 19 that crossed into the wrong month.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxAugust 27, 2026
Silent at the entrance, locked at the exit
Every entry was correct, and still the export button sat grey and said nothing. What was missing were 2 fields on another screen, and the manual covers them. The person who had not read it was not the one at fault.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxAugust 26, 2026
The default was still choosing Japan
In June we removed Japan from the countries we serve, and yet 41 of the 47 accounts created through the Google button after that were still born as Japanese ledgers. What I had changed was the sign in the shop window, not the contents of the warehouse.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post