Notes from Manila
Building it, from here
Notes from the office in Valenzuela on what we are building with KAZENA — what worked, what did not, and what it looks like from the Philippine side.
Mae — President, Inspo Nexus Global
October 25, 2026
The numbers were right; the paper was not filable
The trial balance came out with debits and credits 0 pesos apart, and the paper came back covered in pencil marks. Adding up the printed lines missed the printed total by 2 pesos, and the accountant retyped 212 of 240 lines by hand.
ReadOctober 22, 2026
I verified it on 1 printer and applied it to 5 models
I laid out the kitchen ticket at 48 columns. The 48 was a real measurement, taken on 1 printer out of the 5 models we supported. On 3 of the other 4, the quantity dropped onto a line of its own.
ReadOctober 18, 2026
The end of employment should have been a date, not a flag
The payroll list for the month had eight people on it, the contribution list for the same month had ten. The extra two had stopped working there, and what we forgot to stop came to 14 months of contributions, 23,160 pesos of employer share.
ReadOctober 15, 2026
The first trap was the template we handed out
The import screen said it had imported 1,336 rows; the original file had 1,412. The 76 in between had gone without an error, and they were the recent rows, the ones typed by hand.
ReadOctober 11, 2026
The 250,000 pesos was once a year, not once a quarter
Recounting the figures for the four people on the 8% option left us 140,000 pesos short in all. The rate was right; what was wrong was how many times the deduction could be used.
ReadOctober 8, 2026
“Today” belonged to the store, not to the server
At a store that opens at 6:30 in the morning, the first 90 minutes of sales were landing on the previous day. Every amount was right; the only thing wrong was which day they belonged to.
ReadOctober 5, 2026
What we owe was decided by the paper, not by the ledger
In a month with no transactions, 1 return disappeared from the list. The code I wrote was what decided it could disappear, and what decides the taxes we owe is the registration paper.
ReadOctober 1, 2026
A button that cannot be pressed looks exactly like a broken one
In 3 weeks we were sent 14 messages saying returns were broken. The button was doing exactly what it had been told, and it just stopped without saying so. When I grayed it out, the messages increased.
ReadSeptember 27, 2026
The code was not about the payment, it was about the payee
Every amount on the quarterly list was correct and it still could not be filed. The second character of the expanded withholding code names the payee, not the payment — I learned that after recounting 31 entries.
ReadSeptember 23, 2026
A number that is quietly wrong is a number that stays trusted
The cash drawer was 2,400 pesos short. The cause was a line I wrote, treating a code we could not look up as cash — and what missed it every day was the reconciliation I had put in myself.
ReadSeptember 19, 2026
Payroll is not 1 calculation, it is 4
Our 2 half-month runs came out 2 centavos away from the month's contribution. Chasing that turned up a 375-peso error, and then my own fix put the 2 centavos back.
ReadSeptember 16, 2026
Write the same rule in 2 places and one of them gets forgotten
Our accountant wrote to say the same invoice had 2 numbers. The cause was me, writing one rule in 2 places.
ReadSeptember 13, 2026
The forms, not the rates
I thought it was a matter of swapping the numbers. I estimated 3 days. It took 3 weeks.
Read