ACCOUNTS.md: Companies House for AI Agents

The problem: company finance is still written for people

Companies House has over 5 million companies on it. Every one of them is described for a human reader: a search box, a company page, and accounts filed as a PDF once a year.

That worked when people did the work. It does not work when agents do.

Agents are already doing the bookkeeping, chasing invoices, checking suppliers and preparing returns. Soon they will be agreeing payment terms, underwriting loans and running due diligence on acquisitions. Every one of those jobs starts with the same questions about the company on the other side:

• Who is this company, really?
• How do I invoice it, and how does it pay?
• Is it sound?
• And, if I am allowed: what do its books actually say?

Today an agent answers those the old-world way. It scrapes a register, reads accounts that are up to 21 months out of date, asks someone to export a spreadsheet, and waits. The work is fast; the information is not.

The idea: one file per company, written for agents

Software already solved this exact problem. Coding agents read a file called AGENTS.md at the root of a project before they touch anything. It says what the project is, how it is built and what the rules are. It spread to tens of thousands of projects in a matter of months, because it saves every agent the same discovery work.

Company finance has the same problem and no file. So I am proposing one, and I am calling it ACCOUNTS.md.

ACCOUNTS.md is the front door to a company's finances for any agent. What an agent can see through that door depends on who it is and what the owner has allowed.

Three tiers of access

The granted tier is where the real work happens:

• An accounts agent taking on the books gets full access for the engagement.
• A lender gets two years of figures for 30 days to make a decision.
• An investor or acquirer gets a due diligence view that ends when the deal closes or dies.
• A supplier gets a credit view before it gives 60-day terms.
• The company's own agents (sales, purchasing, payroll) see what their job needs and nothing more.

Every grant is scoped, time-limited, revocable and logged. The owner decides. Not the platform, not the agent.

Why an agent would trust it

A file a company writes about itself is a marketing page. What makes ACCOUNTS.md useful is that every figure carries three things:

• Provenance: where it came from. Typed by the company, calculated from its double-entry books, or taken from a government filing.
• Verification: who or what has checked it. Nobody, the system's own checks (the books balance and match the bank), a named accountant, or a government that accepted it.
• Freshness: when it was last calculated.

These are not one ladder. Filed accounts can be 15 months old. A cash figure from the ledger can be five minutes old. An agent weighs all three for the job in hand: a supplier's agent wants fresh cash and payment history, a lender's agent may want filed figures and this month's management accounts. In the old world we got this once a year, from an audit opinion. In the new world we get it for every figure, today.

The file is the front door

ACCOUNTS.md itself is short and readable: what the company is, what it holds, what an agent can do with it, and where to go next. Behind it the data is structured and live: a schema for every figure, authenticated endpoints for granted data, and verifiable credentials for identity. An agent with a grant asks for the current balance sheet and gets today's, not last year's. Annual accounts become a snapshot of something that is always there.

It is for doing business, not just reading accounts

Understanding a company is only the first step. The real point is doing business with it. Imagine a buyer's agent that finds a supplier, checks it is a real company, reads its payment terms, agrees credit, places an order, receives the invoice, pays it and reconciles it, all without either side opening its whole books to the other.

So ACCOUNTS.md lists actions as well as facts: request a quote, request trade terms, request access, send an invoice, pay. And the safest grant is often an answer rather than the data: "can this company cover £50,000 on 60-day terms?" answered yes or no, with where the answer came from, instead of handing over the ledger.

Companies House for agents

Put the public tiers together and you get a global register: Companies House for agents. It answers the first question every agent asks in any deal: who is this, and how do I deal with them?

Why would a company claim its entry? Not to maintain yet another listing. To get business: to be found by buyers' agents, quote them, invoice them and get paid. It also does not need to start empty. Public registers already list millions of companies, so the register can start with them and each company claims its entry.

It also does not need to reinvent identity. Work on verifiable company identity for agents (GLEIF's verifiable LEI) and on agent payments is well under way. Those are the rails. ACCOUNTS.md is what travels on them: the company's own finances, in a form an agent can use.

What would make it fail

I have pressure tested this against the obvious objections:

• "Companies will just write nice things about themselves." That is why every figure carries where it came from, who checked it and when. Self-declared numbers are allowed; they are just worth less.
• "Revoking access does not unshare what was taken." True, so access goes to verified organisations under agreed terms, every read is logged, and the default is to share answers, not raw data.
• "Files go stale." It is generated from the ledger, with live data behind it.
• "No one will join an empty register." It starts full, from public data.
• "No one will join a register a competitor runs." The format has to be open, so any ledger (Xero, Sage, QuickBooks, a spreadsheet) can produce one.
• "Financial data is private." Nothing beyond the public tier moves without the owner's grant, and every grant is logged.

Get those right and it holds up. Get any one wrong and it becomes a marketing page, a stale PDF or a walled garden.

What we are doing about it

AccountsOS already holds what an ACCOUNTS.md needs: the double-entry ledger, the company's own rules and history, filed accounts, and live filing links with HMRC and Companies House. Finn, our accounts agent, already works this way: she reads the company's context before she touches its books.

So we have started. Every company on AccountsOS now has an ACCOUNTS.md, generated from its books, its filings and what Finn has learned about how it works. It is private by default: the owner can read it, download it, or let their own AI assistant read it through our MCP connector. If they choose, they can publish the public tier with one switch, after a clear consent step, and make it private again at any time. Nothing is published without the owner's say-so.

Next comes one real test: an outside agent, an accountant's or a lender's, asks for access, gets a scoped grant, reads verified figures and does its job. Then an open spec anyone can adopt. Ten companies and two independent agents trading trusted information through it would prove the idea. You do not need millions of listings to start.

The spec, an example file and where we are up to live at accounts-os.com/accounts-md.

Agents are going to run a lot of how companies are managed. They need a front door to a company's finances. I think it looks like this, and I think it should be called ACCOUNTS.md.