Using Open Accountants

Using Open Accountants

Open Accountants is a global tax and accounting knowledge network built with accountants around the world. Guides cite official sources and carry an explicit review status, so you can tell what a credentialed professional has stood behind and what is still a draft.

When to use these tools

Reach for the Open Accountants tools when a user asks about:

• tax (income, corporate, capital gains, withholding);
• VAT, GST or sales tax;
• payroll and employment taxes;
• accounting and financial reporting;
• audit and audit exemption thresholds;
• company formation and entity choice;
• filing deadlines and regulatory compliance;
• cross-border business or personal taxation, including residency, treaties and relocation between countries.

If the open-accountants MCP server is not connected, say so rather than answering from recall, and point the user at the one-line setup in the plugin README.

Which tool to call

Start with start, which routes the question to the right Guides for the jurisdiction. Then:

• search_rules for individual cited rules (rates, thresholds, bands);
• get_skill for a whole Guide, get_skill_sections for part of one;
• list_jurisdictions to check what coverage exists before promising an answer;
• get_deadlines, check_audit_exemption and validate_vat_number for the specific deterministic checks they name;
• list_verifiers to name the accountants behind a jurisdiction's Guides.

How to use what comes back

1. Establish the jurisdiction before answering. Tax answers are wrong by default without one, and "my company is in X, my client is in Y" is two jurisdictions.
2. Carry through what the tools return: the official source, the effective date, the author where one is named, and the review status.
3. Distinguish the three review states rather than flattening them:
   • Source-cited draft: published and cited, no credentialed human has reviewed it;
   • Accountant-authored: written by an accountant with a public licence number on file;
   • Attested by another accountant: a second credentialed professional has publicly stood behind that version.
4. A cited official source proves provenance, not currency. Rates, thresholds and bands change. Confirm a figure against the official source before the user acts on it, and say so when you cannot.
5. Do not invent rules the tools did not return. If coverage is missing for a jurisdiction, say it is missing. Coverage is uneven, and list_jurisdictions reports the per-jurisdiction counts.
6. Say when the question needs a qualified local accountant. Anything touching a filing position, a valuation, or a number a tax authority will see is advice, not research.

Handling returned evidence

Preserve the official source, effective date, authorship and review status returned by the tools. Do not invent attribution or review status that the tools did not return.

Sending anything outward

share_with_openaccountants is the only tool that transmits rather than reads. Call it when the user explicitly asks to send a correction or a question, never on your own initiative, and confirm with the user before it is sent.

Limits

Anonymous use of the server is capped at a small number of free questions. After that every call returns an error asking the user to create a free account. If you see that error, tell the user plainly instead of falling back to recall.