An Enterprise-Grade System, Built For A Small To Medium Enterprise

NPC Office handles the paperwork new businesses in Indonesia cannot handle themselves, and runs virtual offices for them. It knows exactly what each filing needs, what it costs and when it expires, because it does that work every week for other people. Its own back office ran on none of it.

Filling one seat meant opening applications one at a time. Three job boards, hundreds of applications for a single role, and one person reading down the list in the evenings. The cost was never the hours. It was that the reading stopped somewhere, and whoever stopped first decided who was never seen. At the other end, a signed contract became a typing job: the personal details, the tax band, the contribution numbers and the bank account were all entered a second time, into a staff list and a payroll sheet that did not know about each other.

The client side had the same shape. What a client was offered lived in a letter. What they owed lived in an invoice. Whether they had paid lived in the bank’s statement, and nothing joined the three. It mattered more than usual here, because NPC is two companies. One sells virtual offices and the other sells legal services, and their books cannot be combined at year end, so every letter and every invoice has to come from the right one.

Software that handles all of this exists. It is sold to companies with a finance department and an HR department, priced and shaped for them. A small to medium enterprise gets a payroll app, an invoicing app, a folder of templates and the job of carrying the same facts between them by hand.

We built NPC the kind of system a large company buys, and built it to the shape of a small to medium enterprise. It has five modules behind one sign-in: each person’s own record, Services, Finance, HR and Organisation. Five roles decide who sees which. An employee sees their own attendance, leave and payslips and nothing else. An office manager sees their own offices. A page somebody may not open looks exactly like a page that does not exist.

Hiring starts with the person who wants the hire. The owner agrees what a role costs for a year before it exists, then the hiring manager approves the brief, the screening keywords and the questions. Every application is read against those keywords and a shortlist is proposed. A person confirms each cut, in both directions. Nothing is rejected by a machine.

The first join is the signed employment contract. It opens the staff record and the payroll line on its own, so nobody retypes a new starter. From there the person simply lives in the system: they sign in and out on their phone, measured against where the office is, they ask for leave, and they read their own payslip. Payroll has no “add to payroll” button, deliberately. A row is there because a staff record says the person started and gone because it says they left. The month is derived, then signed by Finance and by the owner.

The client side runs the same way. Staff build an offer letter from a catalogue in which every service names the company that bills it, so a letter covering a virtual office and a licence gets one section per company, each with its own tax lines and its own bank account. The office manager reads it, the owner approves and sends it, and the client signs it on their own page. Staff can record a client’s no from a phone call. Nobody can sign for them.

The second join is the money. The invoice is raised from the signed letter and takes its number only when it is sent, so the sequence has no gaps. When the bank statement is uploaded, a credit that matches one invoice exactly applies itself. Anything else is a proposal that waits for a person. The first payment opens the job, with its milestones and the documents the client still owes. A service with an end date gets its renewal invoice drafted 21 days out and reminders at 14, 7 and 1.

Finance closes the loop. Supplier invoices are read from an inbox and each one is confirmed by a person before it counts as a cost. Every company has its own profit and loss and its own balance sheet. A month cannot be closed while a cost is unconfirmed, a bank line is unexplained or the payroll is unsigned, and closing it takes two signatures. Signing off is not paying. The system reads the bank and has no way to move money.