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 & 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 - Accounting & taxAugust 25, 2026
The same account, under 2 names
V sent me a profit-and-loss statement where account 6220 appeared on 2 rows under 2 different names, splitting one total into 4,120,000 and 1,860,000 rupiah. We had been saving the label instead of the fact.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxAugust 24, 2026
Withholding is not a tax on the payment; it is a tax on the year
The same person was paid 150,000,000 rupiah twice, and our software withheld the same amount the second time as the first. The correct figure is the tax on the cumulative base minus what has already been withheld. The gap was 6,000,000 rupiah.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxAugust 23, 2026
I was designing at the wrong width
E sent me a photograph of his phone with our save button falling off the bottom edge. I had been checking at 390px; his device is 360px wide. Eleven screens' worth of oversights were hiding in those 30 pixels.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxAugust 22, 2026
The first trap was the template we handed out
Someone in the Philippines who uses KAZENA Books wrote to say that May's expenses had suddenly grown. Of 284 rows, 187 never arrived and 93 sat in the wrong month — and the cause was the Excel template we hand out ourselves.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxAugust 21, 2026
A zero is not a number
Three weeks into Jakarta. An accountant here tested KAZENA Books with her real data, and the 0 someone had put in a tax-ID field was quietly merging two different people into one — a year-end certificate showing 3 times a person's real income, with no warning at all.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxJuly 28, 2026
We decided not to build inventory management
A pet shop owner's feedback was hard to hear and completely right. Facing up to retail, we chose not to build inventory management at all — and to work instead on the true cost of a product, and on why import VAT and PPh 22 must never be part of it.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post