Most foreign-owned businesses in Bali do not have a compliance problem. They have a calendar problem.
The rules themselves are not complicated. LKPM every quarter. KITAS extension before it expires. Annual tax filing. BPJS for staff. Licence renewals that do not announce themselves. Corporate resolutions for changes that were agreed months ago and never papered.
None of that is hard. All of it is easy to miss when it lives across three WhatsApp groups, one agent’s inbox, and somebody’s memory.
What we typically find
When a business finally asks for help, the same pattern turns up:
- Several quarters of missed LKPM reports
- A KBLI that no longer matches what the business actually does
- Board or shareholder changes agreed verbally and never recorded in an akta
- An agent who handles everything but has never sent the client a single document
Cleaning that up after the fact can cost several times what maintaining it would have.
The fix is unglamorous
We now build the same thing for every client before anything else. One page listing every obligation, who owns it, when it is due, and where the document is actually stored.
We keep it in Notion, for a practical reason: the owner can check it from London at six in the morning, the local manager can add comments from the office in Berawa, and we can update it from ours.
It is the difference between a business you could sell and a business you would have to explain.
If your compliance lives in a WhatsApp group, that is not a system. That is hope.