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.
- LatestAccounting & taxOctober 23, 2026
Cash went up but the month was in the red — why that happens
A month can be in the black while the wallet gets lighter, and cash can go up in a month that was in the red. Neither is an arithmetic mistake. I write down the 3 things that pull profit and cash apart — selling on credit, lump-sum payments and stock — and the month I misread in my own company.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxOctober 18, 2026
Was last month profitable? Find out with 1 subtraction a month
Your body remembers whether a month was busy, but whether it earned anything is a different question. I write down how to check the black or the red once a month without using accounting words, and the mistake I made in treating a month of higher sales as a good month.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxOctober 15, 2026
Keep the shop's money somewhere other than your own wallet
When your own money and the shop's money sit in the same place, you lose the ability to tell whether the business is earning anything. I write down how to separate them, how to record what you paid out of your own pocket, and the mistake I left too long myself.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxOctober 13, 2026
When money moves, write one line the same day
For anyone who has never kept books, here is the one thing I would start with. Not a complete record, but a single line on the day the money moved. I explain why it has to be the same day, and what I got wrong myself.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - Accounting & taxOctober 6, 2026
We stored 'no expiry' and 'never checked' in the same blank field
On 1 October I counted the values we store in order to connect to outside services. There were 11, and for 8 of them we could not say when they were made, because we had been keeping 'no expiry set' and 'expiry never checked' in the same blank field.
Taro — Founder, KAZENARead the post - 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