[ITmedia Business Online] The “cautious” Yayoi will collaborate with general-purpose AI tools. Freee and Manefo will follow in “MCP compatibility,” and what are the “accounting x AI” strategies of each company?

``MCP'' (Model Context Protocol) is a mechanism that allows accounting software to be operated from general-purpose generated AI such as ``Claude''. Following freee and Money Forward, accounting software provider Yayoi (Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo) also plans to support this system from December onwards.

``We should be careful with AI,'' says Yayoi, whose policy is to entrust AI to register journal entries, but not to register business partners. How did Yayoi judge the distance between accounting software and AI?

Freee, background of “cautious stance” in response following money forward

``Yayoi Accounting Next'' (hereinafter referred to as Accounting Next) is cloud accounting software developed by Yayoi separately from the desktop version of ``Yayoi Accounting''. It was officially released in April 2025, and the number of corporate registrations exceeded 20,000 in July 2026. In October, the company began offering "management analysis AI" that shows changes in business conditions based on accounting data.

Accounting Next is scheduled to be compatible with MCP from December onwards. MCP is a common standard for connecting AI and external software. Yayoi herself describes it as something like a "common outlet" that connects AI chat and external services. Accounting Next's MCP can not only read but also write data, making it possible to register journal entries without opening the accounting software screen.

Yuta Kakizawa, a product manager at Accounting Next, asked Claude, who was connected via MCP, to ``focus on September's sales and tell me the key points based on the flow so far.'' The answers returned are lined up with demo numbers recorded in Accounting Next. Mr. Kakizawa explains that if it is a general-purpose AI that is not connected, it will be a ``last-ditch response'' because it does not have data.

Of the three main competing companies in cloud accounting software, freee released its MCP server as OSS on March 2, 2026. Money Forward launched a beta version on October 3, 2025, and expanded to all plans on March 26, 2026. Yayoi's Accounting Next will be the last of the three companies. In September, Yayoi began offering ``Misoca MCP,'' which can be operated from an AI tool, in its billing software ``Misoca,'' but this is the first time for accounting software that handles bookkeeping.

According to Yusuke Kita, product marketing manager in the Accounting Business Unit, there was an idea within the company to release a beta version first. As for why they decided not to do so, Kita says, ``I kept asking myself whether we could properly support correct bookkeeping, taxation, and settlement operations, and whether we could guarantee quality.''

Mr. Kita believes that companies should be especially careful when relying on AI to make management decisions. This is because new hallucination and security issues will arise. Since then, the models of Claude and ChatGPT have evolved, and within the company, ``we have gained a certain amount of experience in using AI while applying control.'' After that, I decided to release it.