A company with no employees is now a normal thing to try to build. One founder, a handful of agents doing the work, contractors for what the agents cannot do. The pitch is that the company runs itself. Its accounting does not, and the part that refuses to run itself is not the bookkeeping. It is the filing.
Take the plain case: a Delaware C-corp, calendar year, no employees, no revenue yet, a founder and three contractors paid through Stripe or Mercury. On March 1 it owes Delaware an annual report, a $50 fee and a franchise tax. The notice from the state shows $85,165 for a company with 10,000,000 authorised shares; the same company owes $400 under the assumed par value method once someone enters its gross assets and issued shares. On April 15 it owes the IRS a Form 1120, the corporate income tax return, even in a year with a loss. On January 31 it owes a 1099-NEC to every US contractor it paid $600 or more, with a copy to the IRS. If a founder works from California, the state wants an $800 minimum franchise tax and a Statement of Information whether or not anyone was hired there.
That is about ten dates a year that carry a penalty, for a company that has, in the payroll sense, nobody in it.
The filings do not care who works there
Every one of those obligations attaches to the entity, not to the headcount. A corporation exists because a state agreed to let it exist, and the state charges for the privilege every year regardless of what happened inside. The IRS wants a return from every domestic corporation that was alive during the year, whether it made money, lost money or did nothing. Contractors who did the work the agents could not do still get a 1099 from someone, and the someone is the company.
What changes in a zero-human company is not the list. It is who notices. In a company with a finance person, March 1 is on a calendar in someone's head. In a company run by a founder and a set of agents, the deadline sits in a state portal nobody visits until the penalty letter arrives: $200 plus 1.5% interest a month for Delaware, and a return that was due in April is now late in October because the extension moved the paperwork and not the payment.
So the first thing a zero-human company needs from its accounting is the same thing every company needs, only more so: the obligations written down somewhere the machines can read, with dates, and something watching them.
What an agent can run, and what it cannot sign
The bookkeeping itself is the part that automates well, and we have written about how far that goes: 97.4% of the transactions in our ledger are categorized without a person deciding, rules first and a ranker trained on our own books for the rest. A company whose only activity is a few dozen card charges and contractor payments a month is the easy end of that distribution. Its books can be current every morning without anyone looking.
The return is a different kind of object. Form 1120 is signed under penalty of perjury by an officer of the corporation, and if a paid preparer prepared it, the preparer signs too and is accountable for it. Delaware's annual report is signed by an officer or director. A 1099 is a statement the company is making to the IRS about someone else's income. None of these is a place where "the agent was fairly confident" is an acceptable state to be in.
This is where the line sits in our own product. Software keeps the ledger current and routes anything it is not sure about to a person instead of guessing. A licensed CPA reviews the financials each month before the founder sees them, and signs and files every return. The founder's agent can do a great deal on either side of that line. It cannot stand in the middle of it.
Your agent can read the books through MCP
What a founder's agent should be able to do is ask. Where is cash this morning. What did we spend on infrastructure last quarter. What is due in the next sixty days and is any of it overdue. Until recently the answer lived in a dashboard a human had to open, which in a zero-human company is the one thing nobody does.
Vecty exposes those answers through an MCP server. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the open standard that lets an AI agent call tools on an outside system in a way the agent understands without custom integration, the same mechanism Claude and most agent frameworks use to reach anything outside themselves. Our server speaks the 2025-06-18 version of the protocol over plain HTTPS.
It has six tools, and all six read. list_companies returns the companies the signed-in user can see. get_profit_loss, get_balance_sheet and get_cash_flow return the three statements for a company over a date range, summary by default, per-transaction detail on request, on either accounting basis. get_vendor_results returns income and expenses grouped by vendor, with the annual totals a 1099 turns on. get_tax_calendar_events returns the scheduled tasks and the pending or overdue compliance deadlines for a period, merged and sorted by due date.
Here is what the last of those looks like on the wire, which is the part an agent framework handles for you:
{
"jsonrpc": "2.0",
"id": 7,
"method": "tools/call",
"params": {
"name": "get_tax_calendar_events",
"arguments": {
"company_id": "…",
"start_date": "2026-09-15",
"end_date": "2026-11-15"
}
}
}
Two properties of the server matter more than the tool list. There is no write path: nothing an agent can call will post an entry, move money, edit a vendor or file anything. And there is no shared secret. The agent authenticates the way a person does, by signing in to a Vecty account through the standard OAuth flow, and every tool call checks that the account can see the company it is asking about, the same rule the reports in the app enforce. An agent sees exactly what the person who connected it can see, and nothing it could not have read on screen.
The same six tools are what Vecty answers with in Slack. The MCP server is the same catalogue with the transport swapped, so whichever agent a founder already runs, it reads the same books the CPA reviews.
What a zero-human company looks like from the accounting side
Connected banks and payment processors feed a ledger that is categorized as transactions land. The tax obligations that apply to the entity, federal and state, sit on a calendar with dates. The founder's own agent reads cash, spend and upcoming deadlines whenever it wants, through the same tools a person would use, and can raise a flag in whatever channel the founder actually watches. When a filing comes due, the books it is prepared from are already closed, and a licensed CPA reviews and signs it.
Zero humans in the company. One where the law requires a signature, and one who checks the work before that. That is the version of the zero-human company we think survives its second tax season.
Common questions
Does a company with no employees still have to file a tax return?
Yes. A US corporation files Form 1120 for every year it exists, including years with no revenue or a loss, and Delaware corporations owe the annual report and franchise tax every March 1 regardless of activity. Employees change payroll filings, not whether the entity files.
Can an AI agent do my bookkeeping?
Most of it. Categorizing bank and card transactions is the part that automates well; in our ledger 97.4% of transactions are categorized without a person deciding. What an agent cannot do is sign a tax return, which an officer and, if used, a paid preparer sign under penalty of perjury, so a licensed CPA still reviews and files.
What can an agent read from Vecty through MCP?
Six read-only tools: the companies the connected user can see, the profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow for a date range, income and expenses by vendor, and the tax calendar of scheduled tasks and compliance deadlines. There is no write path, and the agent signs in through OAuth as the user, so it sees only what that user can see.
Tools that go with this
- Startup tax deadline calendar - every federal and state date for your entity, state and year end
- Delaware franchise tax calculator - the March 1 number, both methods
- Entity type advisor - whether a C-corp is the right container in the first place