Our office is in Valenzuela. The main road runs right past the window, and most mornings I wake to the sound of traffic. This is where I work, and almost everything below happened in this room.
When we decided to carry KAZENA Books in the Philippines, the first thing I did was not think about how to sell it. It was the books themselves. Before selling anything I had to know whether it could produce what this country asks for.
The product grew up around Indonesian conditions. VAT at 11%, withholding under PPh 23, payroll deductions for BPJS. Here VAT is 12%, expanded withholding comes with its ATC codes, and payroll has to satisfy SSS, PhilHealth, Pag-IBIG and the BIR at the same time.
I thought it was a matter of swapping the numbers. I estimated 3 days. It took 3 weeks.
What tripped me was not the rates but the forms. The authority does not want a correct total; it wants a correct total in a fixed order. Get the total right and the order wrong and it comes back. I had treated that as a detail.
Payroll was worse. The four schemes each have their own cut-off and their own rounding. Line one up and another slips. We ended up reproducing, inside the software, the exact difficulty we used to have in a spreadsheet.
The first report we produced had the right numbers and was not in a shape anyone could file. An accountant went through it with me and we fixed it one place at a time. I think we reissued it 20 times.
One failure worth recording. I had the handling of the ATC codes wrong, and we rebuilt 2 weeks of test data because of it. The cause was my own assumption; the specification had said it correctly from the start. It was not that I had not read it — I had read it and thought I understood.
I am in touch with the engineers on the KAZENA side every day. There is only 1 hour between us, so a question sent in the morning usually comes back by lunch. On the days it does not, it is because they are stuck on the same thing.
The best part of this arrangement is that we can say "here is how it works in the Philippines" and have it matter. A distributor who only buys and resells never gets the forms fixed, because nobody upstream hears about them. We can reach into the product, so it gets fixed.
Books now produces its reports in the authority's format. Not all of them yet. We are adding to it, and each week we decide which one comes next.
One disclaimer. I am not a tax practitioner. What is written here is a record of our own work, and any filing decision should be checked with a professional.