特別版「『人とお金』のデータがつながるとスモールビジネスの経営はどう変わるのか」(弥生株式会社・喜多佑介)

Yusuke Kita's Career—An Insider's Perspective on Back-Office Work

Yusuke Kita joined Yayoi Co., Ltd. in October 2025, marking almost exactly one year at the company. He began his career in 2015 at a large manufacturer, where from his very first year he was involved in corporate planning, management accounting, budget-versus-actual tracking, and mid-term business plan development. He later moved through roles in advertising and at a back-office software firm before joining Yayoi. He describes his edge as understanding "the difficulty and weight of this work because I've actually done it myself." A formative experience—the moment corporate planning stopped being about compiling numbers and started being about helping sales and marketing teams act on them—became a driving motivation for his current focus on supporting small businesses.

What Happens When You Hire Someone—The Chain Reaction of Labor and Payroll Tasks

The decision to hire sets off an immediate surge in complexity. The hiring pipeline alone—job board postings, interviews, offer letters—is just the beginning. Social-insurance and pension enrollment, employment contracts, first-month payroll calculation, and the annual year-end tax adjustment follow. As headcount grows, the volume of tasks snowballs.

On top of that, businesses must manage multi-component pay structures—position pay, housing allowances, and other line items—alongside rule changes that update on an annual or semi-annual basis. At many small and mid-sized companies, a single general-affairs staff member carries both accounting and HR responsibilities, making it easy for essential sales or creative work to be crowded out. Kita notes that it is not unusual for owners to be overwhelmed by administrative tasks, leading to overtime that in turn generates further overtime-processing paperwork—a self-reinforcing cycle.

Siloed Systems, Double-Entry, and the Opportunity Cost

Although accounting and HR are distinct functions, disconnected software forces manual handoffs between them: attendance records must be re-keyed into payroll systems, and payroll output must be exported as a CSV file and imported into accounting software. Kita illustrates the problem with the example of a neighborhood Chinese restaurant where the point-of-sale register is not connected to the internet, daily tickets are still entered by hand, and staff hours are submitted on paper and transcribed into Excel—a situation he says remains common across Japanese small businesses. Companies like these often rely on tax accountants (税理士) and social insurance labor consultants (社労士) for bookkeeping, meaning there is a significant lag before owners see their own numbers.

Yayoi NEXT Series: Integration and Efficiency Gains

Yayoi Kyuyo NEXT (弥生給与NEXT) handles the entire employment lifecycle within a single system: offer-letter and contract generation, daily attendance punching, payroll calculation, and year-end tax adjustment. Linked with Yayoi Kaikei NEXT (弥生会計NEXT), it transfers payroll data to the accounting side in one click, where it is automatically posted as journal entries. The only remaining human task is to review the figures.

Real customer results include one company that cut the two-to-three days previously spent on attendance and payroll processing to under one day—a 71% reduction. IT consulting and real-estate firms have compressed year-end closing work from 70–100 hours to 10 hours. Yayoi Kaikei NEXT won the 2025 Good Design Award, and ITreview users frequently cite its clean, intuitive interface; the UI is designed so that even owners without accounting expertise can complete year-end closing themselves. Tax accountants and social insurance labor consultants can also log into the system and view real-time data directly, eliminating the traditional lag of waiting for files to be shared before they can respond.

AI-Supported Management Decisions—From Cash-Flow Signals to Consultation Chat

Beyond efficiency, Yayoi Kaikei NEXT uses accumulated accounting data to run a cash-flow analysis feature: AI automatically projects the next six months and presents the balance outlook as a traffic light—green, yellow, or red. A red signal might prompt the owner to accelerate receivables collection or explore financing; green might signal readiness to invest in hiring or a new business line. A beta "management consultation chat" has also launched, answering owners' questions in a chat interface grounded in their actual closing data.

Kita summed up the underlying philosophy: "The value humans bring is not in compiling the numbers—it's in interpreting them and applying them to decisions about investment, hiring, and business growth." With a corporate lineage spanning roughly 50 years, about 40 years in accounting services, and more than 4 million registered users, Yayoi's stated mission is to keep building an environment where anyone with ambition can concentrate on genuine value creation rather than being knocked out by administrative barriers.