Founders looking for the Business Manager Visa business plan template will not find one. The Immigration Services Agency does not publish a format, does not prescribe headings, and does not issue a checklist for the expert who has to confirm it.
What it publishes instead is three words. The plan must show 具体性、合理性、実現可能性 — specificity, rationality, and feasibility. Everything else about this requirement follows from taking those three seriously, and from one fact that changes how you should write: a named professional has to put their signature on your plan.
Who signs, and why it matters
The confirmation must come from someone with professional knowledge of business management. The Agency names three qualifications: certified SME management consultant (中小企業診断士), certified public accountant (公認会計士), or certified tax accountant (税理士). The credential has to be Japanese — a US CPA does not qualify.
Note who is not on that list. A gyoseishoshi, the profession most founders engage to handle the visa itself, cannot provide this. Neither can a consultant without one of the three qualifications, however experienced. The full position, and the correction we made to our own earlier reporting of it, is on who can verify your business plan.
Now the part that should shape your drafting. That professional is attaching their name and their licence to an assertion that your plan is feasible. They carry the reputational consequence if it plainly was not. This is not a stamp; it is an opinion someone is accountable for.
So the useful question when writing is not “does this look like a business plan?” It is “would a tax accountant put their name to this?” That question kills more bad paragraphs than any template would.
What the three words mean in practice
Specificity — numbers with sources attached
“We will target the growing inbound tourism market” is not specific. “We will sell to the 340 licensed operators in this prefecture, of which we have letters of interest from four” is. The test is whether a reader can check what you claim.
Where a figure comes from matters as much as the figure. A revenue projection built from a stated price, a stated volume and a stated conversion rate can be argued with. One that arrives as a round number in a spreadsheet cannot be argued with, which is worse — there is nothing there to defend.
Rationality — the numbers agree with each other
This is where plans most often fall apart, and it is mechanical rather than creative. Does the revenue line require more customers than the market has? Does the headcount support the sales volume? Does the office you have leased hold the staff you say you will employ? Do the costs include the employer’s social insurance contribution, or only the salary?
That last one is a common gap, and it is the kind an accountant spots in seconds. If your plan budgets a salary but not the roughly fifteen percent that sits on top, the person being asked to sign already knows the model is wrong. We set that cost out in social insurance and the mandatory employee.
Feasibility — you specifically can do this
Feasibility is about the fit between the plan and the person. A plan that would work for someone with fifteen years in the industry is not feasible for an applicant who has never worked in it, and the reviewer can see your background because it is in the same application.
This connects to the management experience requirement — three years of business management or a relevant degree. Your plan should be a business that your own record makes plausible. Where it is a departure from your background, say so and explain what closes the gap, rather than leaving the reviewer to notice the mismatch themselves.
The plan has to agree with the rest of the application
The business plan is not read in isolation. It sits beside your capital, your employee, your premises and your own history, and inconsistency between them is a refusal risk in its own right.
| If your plan says | The rest of the file must show |
|---|---|
| You will employ three people in year one | Premises that can hold them and a payroll budget that carries them |
| Revenue from month three | A route to customers that exists now, not one you will start building after arrival |
| Equipment or inventory purchases | Capital allocated to them, not fully committed elsewhere |
| You will run operations personally | A background that makes that credible, or a plan for the gap |
The reasons applications actually fail are collected in why Business Manager Visa applications are refused, and most of them are versions of the same thing: two parts of the file that do not agree.
Engage the verifier early, not at the end
The common sequence is to write the plan, finish it, and then look for someone to sign it. That gets the order backwards, for a practical reason: the professional who will sign has to be satisfied, and finding out what satisfies them after the plan is finished means rewriting it.
Bringing a tax accountant in while the numbers are still soft costs the same money and produces a plan built to be signable. It also solves a second problem at the same time — the tax accountant you engage for the verification is a candidate for the ongoing accounting work you need anyway.
The Agency says nothing about what this costs or how you choose the expert. There is no fee schedule and no assignment procedure. That silence means it is a commercial negotiation, and one you should price before you commit. Ask whether the verification is inside a firm’s package price or billed separately — at least one firm in our directory states it charges for this at cost, on top.
What to ask
- Do you hold one of the three qualifications, and will you personally sign the confirmation?
- What do you need from me before you will agree to review the plan at all?
- Is the verification included in your fee or separate, and what is it?
- What would make you decline to sign?
The last question is the informative one. An adviser who has never declined is either very lucky or not reading closely, and their signature is worth correspondingly less.
Our directory lists English-speaking tax accountants in Japan and records which firms publish their fees. The rest of the requirements are in what the October 2025 rules actually require.
This summarises published criteria. What a particular reviewer will accept is a matter for that reviewer, and your own plan needs a licensed professional.