Who Can Verify Your Business Plan? The Three Qualifications

Since 16 October 2025, a Business Manager Visa application must include a business plan confirmed by someone with professional knowledge of business management. The Immigration Services Agency defines who that is, and the definition is narrower than “an adviser” and wider than most English coverage suggests.

Three qualifications count, and the Agency’s Q&A names them: certified small and medium enterprise management consultant (中小企業診断士), certified public accountant (公認会計士), and certified tax accountant (税理士). The qualification must be the Japanese one — a foreign credential such as a US CPA is explicitly excluded.

Registration as a certified support organization is not required. We originally reported this requirement as resting on the SME Agency’s register of certified support organizations (認定経営革新等支援機関), and corrected it on 29 August 2026 after checking the Agency’s own Q&A. Registration is a different scheme. What the visa rule asks for is one of the three qualifications above.

The consequence still catches people out, for a simpler reason: a gyoseishoshi is not on the list. The immigration specialist handling your application — the profession most foreign founders engage first — cannot verify your business plan. A tax accountant can.

Below we record what our directory holds. The register searches are retained because they are a real record of what we checked and when, but read them as background: registration is not the test.

Background, not the test. Verification requires one of three Japanese qualifications — SME management consultant, CPA or tax accountant — and not registration as a certified support organization. We searched that register before we understood the distinction: 3 firms appear in it, 33 were searched without a match. Use it as a record of what we checked, and read the correction above.

Registered as a certified support organization (3)

Same name in the register, different entity (1)

Daiichi Sogo Administrative Scrivener Law Firm — Unclear. A tax corporation of the same name, 税理士法人第一綜合事務所 (Chuo-ku, Tokyo), is in the SME Agency register, but this listing is the gyoseishoshi corporation 行政書士法人第一綜合事務所 and we could not establish from public information whether they are the same organisation. Searched Tokyo and Osaka, 19 August 2026. Ask the firm directly.

Searched, no match returned (33)

Not applicable — office operators, which do not vet business plans (16)

BLINK Community · CIC Tokyo · Compass Offices Japan · CROSSCOOP (TKP Biz Office) · Entre Support · fabbit · Ginza Business Center · Hello Office (Arealink) · H¹O · JustCo Japan · nex THE HUB · Regus Japan · SENQ · Servcorp Japan · Tensho Office · The Executive Centre (TEC Japan)

Could not be searched — we could not establish which registered entity to search against (1)

Register Company in Japan

How we searched

We used the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency’s official search system, searching by the name each firm trades under, in the prefecture that firm is based in — Osaka for the Kansai firms, Kanagawa for the Kawasaki one, and both where a firm has offices in two places.

As a control we searched a large domestic accounting group that is registered. It appeared immediately, which tells us the search works on names and that a blank result is a real result rather than a broken query.

What a “no match” does and does not mean

This is the part to read before you use these findings for anything.

A no-match is not proof that a firm is unregistered. Registration is recorded against a legal entity name, which is frequently not the brand a firm markets under. A gyoseishoshi corporation may be registered under a name that shares no characters with its English trading name. Our search would miss that, and we would rather say so than let a blank result read as a finding it cannot support.

What the pattern does support is narrower and still useful: assume the firm handling your visa cannot verify your business plan until they tell you otherwise. Ask directly, ask early, and get a straight answer before you engage anyone.

It is also worth knowing that the professions named in the scheme are tax accountants, CPAs and SME management consultants, so it is often assumed a gyoseishoshi is categorically excluded. That is not quite right — searching the register, we found at least one gyoseishoshi corporation registered under the “other” category. You cannot tell from the profession alone.

If your firm is not registered

Most immigration practices are not, and that is not a mark against them — the scheme names tax accountants, CPAs and SME management consultants, which is why the three registered firms above are all tax practices. It simply means the verification has to come from somewhere else: an in-house professional, an affiliated one, or one of the registered firms engaged separately for that piece. When you compare quotes, check whether that verification is included in the price or billed on top. At least one firm in our directory states explicitly that it charges this separately at cost, which is honest but means the headline package price is not the whole number.

The rest of the October 2025 requirements — capital, employee, language, management experience, premises — are in what the rules actually require. Which firms publish what they charge is on which firms publish their fees.

What the plan itself has to show

Finding someone qualified is half of it. The other half is a plan they are willing to sign — the Agency publishes no template, and the standard is three words: specific, rational, feasible. We work through what those mean in practice in the business plan: there is no template.

Corrections

If you are a listed firm and you are registered as a certified support organization, tell us the registered entity name and we will re-search, correct the listing and re-date it. There is no charge, and it has nothing to do with advertising. We would rather be corrected than be confidently wrong about a firm’s credentials.