Domain Standards & Learning Map

Interwise operates in domains where being wrong is expensive and invisible. A payslip that is off by Rp 40,000 looks exactly like a payslip that is correct. A bank file that silently drops one row looks exactly like a successful disbursement. In domains like these, the failure mode is not bad code — it is shipping something that looks right because nobody on the team knew what right meant.

Software engineering has Agile. HR, payroll, accounting, and money movement have their own equivalents: professional bodies of knowledge, named frameworks, and — in Indonesia’s case — statutory regulation that functions as a literal specification. This page lists them per capability, alongside what to learn before we build there.

It is not a syllabus to complete. It is the bar to clear before an initiative enters build.

The rule: no initiative enters build until someone on the team has cleared the competence test for its capability. A number we cannot explain is a number we cannot be trusted to compute — and per the vision, being trusted enough not to be re-checked is the whole product.

The explainers#

This page is the map. Where a concept below is one the team has to actually hold rather than look up, there is an illustrated explainer for it in the Frameworks group, written so that the version we work from is the same one, and tied to our own strategy rather than left generic:

• The Ulrich Model — how HR functions are organised, and which of the three parts opens our software.
• The Payroll Cycle — the stages, the cut-off, the point of no return, and where our north star is measured.
• Gross to Net — the sequence, and why each step runs on a different base.
• The Employee Lifecycle — read as a map of handovers, which is where manual work actually comes from.
• Job Architecture & Wage Structure — grades and bands, and the Indonesian legal requirement hiding inside them.
• Org Design & the Star Model — why an org chart is a data model, not a picture.
• Compliance as a Calendar — the regulation stack, its rhythm, and why latency is the only differentiator.
• Double-Entry & the Payroll Journal — what has to be true before we move a single rupiah.
• Performance Management — the review cycle, and the warning-letter chain that decides a severance figure.

How to Use This Page#

Each section follows the same three-part shape:

• What to learn — the concepts that must actually be in someone’s head.
• Where to learn it — the standard, the certification syllabus, or the primary source. Regulation text and bank specifications, not blog summaries.
• Competence test — a demonstration, not a reading checkbox. If you can do the thing, you know the domain.

Three working principles cut across every section:

1. Primary sources over summaries. The regulation, the bank’s file spec, and the client’s own spreadsheet are the three documents that matter. The spreadsheet is the requirements document — every column is a field, every manual step is a feature.
2. Recompute by hand before you spec. If you cannot reproduce a real output to the rupiah with a calculator, you do not understand the rule well enough to specify it.
3. Sit through one full cycle. One month next to the person doing the work, noting every workaround, beats any amount of reading.

Regulations move. Every citation on this page is the current reference as we understand it, and must be re-verified against JDIH Kemnaker, peraturan.go.id, or pajak.go.id before it drives code.

Foundations — Everyone#

Whatever you build, you are building inside an HR function with a known shape and a payroll process with a known sequence.

What to learn

• The employee lifecycle — attract, hire, onboard, develop, reward, retain, exit. Our product surface maps onto it one-to-one, and it is how HR people themselves think.
• The Ulrich model — HR Business Partners, Centres of Excellence, and HR Shared Services. It tells you who our users actually are; payroll lives in shared services, and the person who buys is usually not the person who operates.
• Gross-to-net as a controlled sequence, not a formula. Order matters, and our payroll engine commits to a specific one.
• The Indonesian statutory stack at headline level: UU 13/2003 as amended by UU 6/2023 (Cipta Kerja), PP 35/2021 (employment terms, working time, severance), PP 36/2021 as amended by PP 51/2023 (wages).

Where to learn it

• SHRM BoCK (US, broadest and most practical) or the CIPD Profession Map (UK, free and well-structured) for the HR discipline as a whole.
• SKKNI Manajemen SDM / BNSP certification for the Indonesian standard — and for credibility with Indonesian HR heads.
• Competitor help centres — Talenta, Gadjian, and SunFish documentation is a free, Indonesian-language HR-operations curriculum that doubles as competitive intelligence.

Competence test — recompute one real payslip by hand, end to end, and match the client’s number to the rupiah.

Payroll Operations#

The engine is the easy half. The operational discipline around it — the cycle, the controls, the exceptions — is what separates payroll software from a calculator.

What to learn

• The payroll calendar: cut-off, input freeze, parallel run, review, approval, disbursement, post-payroll close. Each has a distinct owner and a distinct failure.
• Exception and variance analysis — month-over-month comparison is how real payroll teams catch errors before payment. It is the single most under-built feature in the category, and the most direct expression of our “explain, don’t just compute” bet.
• The hard cases: mid-period joiners and leavers, rehires and multiple employment periods, retro pay, arrears, negative net pay, off-cycle and special runs, final settlement.
• The earnings and deductions taxonomy, and which bases each item feeds — taxable, BPJS-able, proratable. One item can be in some bases and not others.
• GL posting: the payroll journal, expense versus liability versus cash, and cost centre allocation.
• Payroll KPIs: first-time-right rate, on-time payment percentage, errors per 1,000 payslips, cost per payslip.

Where to learn it

• PayrollOrg (US) — the FPC syllabus, then CPP. The tax content is US-specific; the process, controls, and reconciliation content is universal and is the best-codified version of this discipline anywhere.
• CIPP (UK) for the same body of knowledge with a stronger controls emphasis.
• For service providers like us: SOC 1 / ISAE 3402 — what a payroll processor gets asked to produce by a client’s auditor.

Competence test — given only two months of raw data, explain in plain Bahasa why one employee’s take-home pay changed between them, itemised.

Tax & Statutory Reporting (PPh 21)#

What to learn

• TER versus bracket: which applies when, annualisation, the December and final-month settlement, PTKP, position allowance (biaya jabatan), the no-NIK surcharge, and the three tax methods — gross, nett, and gross-up.
• Filing, not just calculation: e-Bupot 21/26, SPT Masa, and Coretax submission. A correct number we cannot file is not done.
• The edges: expatriates, PPh 26, non-employee income, severance taxation, multi-employer employees.

Where to learn it

• PMK 168/2023, PP 58/2023, and PER-2/PJ/2024 — the primary sources for TER and the current withholding regime.
• Brevet A/B tax certification. Disproportionately useful given PPh 21 is our compliance core.
• A practising tax accountant, retained for worked examples. This is the cheapest expertise we can buy and the highest-consequence area to be wrong in.

Competence test — reproduce a tax accountant’s worked example, to the rupiah, for (a) a mid-year joiner who receives a bonus, and (b) that same employee’s December settlement.

BPJS & Statutory Benefits#

What to learn

• Kesehatan versus Ketenagakerjaan (JKK, JKM, JHT, JP, JKP) — rates, ceilings, the employer/employee split, and the precise wage base each is computed on. The wage base definitions differ between programmes, and that is where implementations go wrong.
• Registration and monthly reporting flows: e-Dabu, SIPP, and the file formats each expects.
• Family coverage rules, mid-month enrolment, and what happens on termination.

Where to learn it

• UU 24/2011, PP 82/2018 (Kesehatan), PP 44/2015 (JKK/JKM), PP 46/2015 as amended by PP 60/2015 (JHT), PP 45/2015 (JP), PP 37/2021 (JKP).
• Our own Compliance Reference for the values the engine currently uses.

Competence test — hand-compute both schemes for one salary below every ceiling and one above every ceiling, and state which regulation sets each number.

Time, Attendance & Leave#

What to learn

• Working-time law: PP 35/2021 and Kepmenaker 102/2004 — the 7-and-8-hour day patterns, overtime caps, and the tiered multipliers.
• Shift patterns and rostering, night differential, public holidays and cuti bersama.
• Leave accrual mechanics: front-loaded versus accrued-per-period, carry-over and expiry, encashment, the 12-day statutory annual minimum, long-service leave.
• Statutory leaves: maternity under UU 4/2024 (KIA), paternity, sick leave with its declining pay scale, marriage and bereavement leave.
• Attendance-to-pay semantics — precisely what makes a day unpaid, and how absence codes translate into money. This is a pay-semantics change, which is why it needs a staged rollout rather than a flag flip.

Where to learn it

• The regulations above, read directly.
• One real client’s leave policy document, mapped field by field onto our model.

Competence test — model one real client’s shift pattern and leave policy end to end, including a public holiday worked and a mid-year hire’s pro-rated entitlement, without falling back to a spreadsheet.

Org Structure & Job Architecture#

The org chart is not a drawing. It is a data model that payroll, approvals, and hiring all read from — and in Indonesia, part of it is legally mandatory.

What to learn

• Positions versus people. A position exists whether or not it is filled. Vacancies, headcount plan versus actual, and requisitions all depend on this distinction, and most HRIS collapse it wrongly.
• Effective-dated reporting lines, and multiple concurrent hierarchies — reporting line versus cost centre versus approval routing. They diverge in real organisations.
• Galbraith’s Star Model — strategy, structure, processes, rewards, people. Structure is one point of five, which is exactly the insight needed here: the chart is a projection of decisions made elsewhere.
• Spans and layers — healthy norms are roughly 5–8 direct reports and no more than 6–7 layers. Matrix and dotted-line reporting.
• Job architecture: job families, levels, grades, and the job catalogue. The industry-standard evaluation methodologies are Mercer IPE (most common in Indonesian large corporates), Korn Ferry Hay Guide Chart (the classic point-factor method), WTW Global Grading System, and Radford levelling (tech).
• Compensation mechanics: salary bands and midpoints, compa-ratio, range penetration, market pricing against benchmark surveys, the merit matrix, pay equity.
• Struktur dan skala upah is required by law — Permenaker 1/2017, under PP 36/2021 as amended by PP 51/2023. Job architecture written into regulation, and a product opportunity: most SMEs comply with a spreadsheet.

Where to learn it

• Kates & Galbraith, Designing Your Organization — practical and workshop-oriented.
• Naomi Stanford, Guide to Organisation Design — the operator’s handbook.
• Mercer, Korn Ferry, and WTW published methodology overviews; local salary guides from Mercer, Korn Ferry, Michael Page.

Competence test — take a real client’s org, produce a compliant wage structure and scale from it, then write the data model that would survive a retroactive reorg without corrupting historical payroll.

Payments & Disbursement#

The capability with the widest gap between “seems simple” and “is simple”. Moving money is an accounting problem first, a distributed-systems problem second, and a regulatory problem third — and we must be competent in all three before writing a line of it.

What to learn — accounting

• Double-entry accounting: debits and credits, T-accounts, the chart of accounts, and why every movement has two sides. Non-negotiable.
• The payroll journal specifically: salary expense, statutory liabilities (PPh 21 payable, BPJS payable), net pay liability, and cash. Understand which entries clear and when.
• Accruals versus cash, clearing and suspense accounts, and the trial balance as a correctness check.

What to learn — ledger design

• Append-only, immutable entries. Balances are derived, never stored-and-updated. Corrections are new entries, not edits.
• Money as integer minor units, never floats — the same discipline our Money value object already enforces.
• Idempotency keys and exactly-once semantics. A retried disbursement must not pay twice; this is the failure that ends a payroll company.
• Payment state machines — instructed, submitted, settled, returned, failed — and the fact that “no response” is a distinct state from “failed”.

What to learn — rails and file formats

• Indonesian rails and their real constraints: BI-FAST, SKNBI, RTGS, and intrabank transfer — per-transaction limits, cut-off times, settlement windows, fees.
• Per-bank payroll upload specifications — BCA, Mandiri, BNI, BRI. Fixed-width versus delimited quirks, control totals and checksums, account-name validation, and how each bank reports a partial-batch rejection.
• Reconciliation: three-way match between instruction, bank statement, and ledger; the unmatched-item workflow; and how breakage is investigated rather than written off.

What to learn — regulatory and operational safety

• Bank Indonesia payment-system regulation and the PJP/PJSP licensing categories — and therefore the bright line we must not cross: we do not hold customer funds without a licence. Disbursement is instructed from the client’s own account.
• APU-PPT (AML/CTF) obligations and KYC expectations that attach to money movement.
• Dual approval, per-run amount limits, an immutable audit trail, and the difference between a reversal and a correcting entry.

Where to learn it

• Any solid introduction to double-entry bookkeeping — Accounting for Non-Accountants is enough to start; the ledger chapters of a bookkeeping certification are better.
• Engineering write-ups on financial ledger design from Modern Treasury and similar ledger-first companies — the best public material on immutability and idempotency in money systems.
• The banks’ own payroll file specifications, obtained from a client’s corporate banking relationship. There is no substitute and no public copy.
• Bank Indonesia regulation on payment systems and payment service providers, read directly, plus counsel on where the licensing line sits.

Competence test — on paper, before any code: journal one full payroll run through a chart of accounts, produce the disbursement instruction, then reconcile a bank statement containing one rejected row back to a zero unmatched balance — and state exactly which entries a retry of that run must and must not create.

Billing & Revenue#

Our own book, not the customer’s. Getting paid is a domain too.

What to learn

• Seat-based subscription mechanics: mid-cycle proration, upgrades and downgrades, and how each affects the invoice and MRR/ARR, gross versus net churn, expansion.
• Revenue recognition basics — PSAK 72 / IFRS 15, deferred revenue, and why cash collected is not revenue earned.
• Indonesian invoicing: PPN, e-Faktur and faktur pajak, and PPh 23 withholding on services — clients will withhold, and the reconciliation must expect it.
• Dunning, failed payments, and involuntary churn.

Where to learn it

• Standard SaaS metrics references (a16z, Bessemer) for the definitions, then our own contract and seat model as the ground truth.
• An Indonesian tax consultant for e-Faktur and PPh 23 mechanics.

Competence test — state exactly what happens to the invoice, deferred revenue, and MRR when a tenant adds five seats mid-cycle and then cancels before the next renewal.

Security, Tenancy & Data Protection#

Payroll data is among the most sensitive data a business holds. This is a compliance domain, not only an engineering one.

What to learn

• UU 27/2022 (PDP) — controller versus processor roles, lawful basis and consent, data subject rights, the breach-notification obligation, and cross-border transfer rules. We are a processor for our customers’ employee data, and that shapes our contracts.
• Tenant isolation as we actually implement it: row-level security, and specifically what defeats it — a superuser or BYPASSRLS role silently bypasses every policy.
• Audit trail design: what must be immutable, who may read it, and how long it is kept.
• SOC 1 / ISAE 3402 and the security questionnaires an enterprise buyer will send.

Where to learn it

• UU 27/2022 read directly, plus its implementing guidance.
• Our own Roles & Access documentation for the implemented model.

Competence test — complete a real enterprise security questionnaire, unaided, and correctly identify every question we would currently have to answer “no” to.

Hiring & Recruiting#

What to learn

• The requisition-to-hire funnel and its standard metrics: time-to-fill versus time-to-hire, stage pass-through rates, offer acceptance rate, source effectiveness, quality of hire.
• Structured interviewing and scorecards — Smart & Street, Who — and why structured beats unstructured on predictive validity. Interviewer calibration and bias mitigation.
• Requisition approval and its dependency on org structure and headcount plan.
• The offer-to-onboarding-to-payroll handoff — the seam where our ATS earns its keep, because nobody re-keys anything.

Where to learn it

• Who (Smart & Street) for structured hiring; Google’s re:Work materials for structured interviewing practice.
• One real requisition, run end to end.

Competence test — run one real requisition to a signed offer using nothing but a spreadsheet, then write down precisely which steps software should have removed and which it should have left to a human.

Reporting & People Analytics#

What to learn

• Standard HR metrics and their exact definitions: headcount versus FTE, turnover split voluntary and involuntary, tenure distribution, absenteeism rate, cost per employee, payroll cost as a percentage of revenue.
• ISO 30414 — the human capital reporting standard, useful as a checklist of what leadership eventually asks for.
• The statutory and operational report set: payroll register, GL summary, BPJS and tax reports, bank disbursement summary.

Where to learn it

• ISO 30414 summary material; standard HR dashboard references.
• What our own clients currently assemble by hand each month.

Competence test — produce a board-ready people and payroll pack from raw data, and defend every definition on it.

The Two Crafts That Sit Alongside This#

Domain knowledge tells you what is correct. Two further crafts decide what is worth building and how a messy question becomes a defensible answer. Both are used across every Systeric team, not just Interwise, so they live in the company handbook rather than here:

• Discovery Craft — interviewing so people cannot mislead you, the weekly trio cadence and opportunity solution tree, Cagan’s four risks, riskiest-assumption testing, and how to read a competitor who publishes nothing. The last one matters here: Indonesian HR and payroll vendors are almost all sales-led.
• Structured Problem Solving — writing the question down, answering first (Pyramid Principle and SCQA), MECE issue trees, day-one hypotheses, and naming who decides. Includes which consulting frameworks to adopt, which to use situationally, and which to skip.

Where Learning Is Not Enough#

Some knowledge is cheaper to buy than to acquire, and buying it is not a failure of rigour — it is how we avoid certifying our own homework:

Where to Go Next#

• Overview — what Interwise is and the loop from hire to compliant payslip.
• Payroll Engine — the calculation order these standards are implemented as.
• Compliance Reference — the exact statutory values currently wired in.
• Concepts & Data Model — the nouns the org, payroll, and hiring domains share.