Benjamin Franklin once said that in this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes — and we all know none of the two things is pleasant when it arrives. While there’s little we can do about the first, things are less dim when it comes to the latter.
OnlinePajak was founded in 2014 out of Charles Guinot’s frustration when dealing with Indonesia’s complicated tax application process for his company. Now, OnlinePajak has become Indonesia’s leading tax compliance application with more than 500,000 corporate clients — including the country’s biggest corporates from Garuda Indonesia, Telkomsel, Huawei to Astra — and over US$ 3 billion tax facilitated to date.
OnlinePajak’s business model resolves the two-sided problems surrounding taxes: the administrative burden to count, file, and pay taxes faced by taxpayers; and the challenges faced by the Government to get taxpayers carry out their responsibilities. Through their platform, OnlinePajak makes all the calculating, filing, and paying simple. Their platform has it all, from making billing ID, calculating income taxes, integrating data from different platforms, to paying taxes online using their payment gateway PajakPay.
OnlinePajak offers free services for employees, corporate, individual taxes, to e-commerce taxes. Users need to pay only if they opt for customized features and API integration services.
OnlinePajak believes in partnership with existing players in the tax ecosystem to further support Indonesia’s economic development through tax collection. Hence, through PajakPartner, OnlinePajak’s platform and services are integrated with 16 tax consultants, 2 HR SaaS, 3 accounting softwares, 2 national banks, and an e-commerce company.
OnlinePajak’s mission is much bigger than just doing business as they are committed to educate Indonesians about taxes and make paying taxes easier.
“That’s the biggest challenge we’re facing: how to grow the market and educate tax payers. The hypothesis behind OnlinePajak is that nobody likes paying taxes, but people know that they have to do it. However, the procedures are too complicated and nobody knows how to do it,” Charles say. “Every day we find new cases of tax compliance difficulties that we never thought would appear, but that’s the truth. So, we need to completely transform the tax system and convince taxpayers to let us help them.”
The company’s latest feature, PajakPay, is how OnlinePajak tries to simplify administrational burden for their users, especially SMEs.
“If you look at our features, we also do payroll and invoicing. We want to simplify the administration as much as possible. For taxes, believe it or not, SMEs do care about taxes, but the process is too complex. Most of them don’t really understand mobile banking tokens or how to pay taxes in person, but everybody understands pulsa and one-click-pay. That’s why we created PajakPay,” Charles says.
“People usually pay taxes in cash and this opens up possibilities of fraud, even from their internal team. This typically happens in Indonesia. It’s like you want to do good but somehow you just cannot.”
With their rapid development, great track record, and tangible social impact, OnlinePajak is off to a brighter future in 2018 with bigger trust from both the Government and Indonesian taxpayers.
“Until we arrived, nobody believed that it’s a good idea to partner with the Tax Office. For them, it was always about building new branches to reach people. But now, the Government see that we can bring something unique to the table, especially because we don’t have the administrative constraints like state regulations and state budget, so we can take measures fast and easily as needed,” Charles says. “Now, the mission is to tell more people that we are ready to do this, we cost zero for the Government and the taxpayers, and most of all, that we’re good at what we do.”
Learn more about OnlinePajak here: https://www.online-pajak.com/id
