BridgeIf you run a business in Japan and bill overseas clients, you've probably wondered whether freee or Money Forward (MF) is the better choice for English invoicing. The honest answer: neither handles it well. Both are excellent domestic accounting tools that were never designed for cross-border billing. Here's a straight comparison.
The short version
| freee | Money Forward | |
|---|---|---|
| English invoice templates | Was possible via Custom Template — closed to new users (Aug 2025) | No native English template |
| Foreign-currency invoices | Not supported | Not supported (JPY only) |
| Exchange-rate display | No | No |
| インボイス compliance (JP) | Yes | Yes |
| API access to invoice data | Yes (請求書 API) | Limited |
freee: the door that just closed
freee's Custom Template feature let advanced users build a custom layout, which some used to produce English invoices. But freee stopped offering Custom Template to new users in August 2025. If you didn't already have it, that route is gone. The standard invoice feature is Japanese-only, with no foreign-currency or exchange-rate support.
freee does, however, expose your invoice data through its API — which means the data can be reused by other tools.
Money Forward: never supported foreign currency
Money Forward's cloud invoicing is firmly domestic. Its own help documentation acknowledges that foreign-currency invoices are not supported — amounts are in JPY, labels are in Japanese, and there's no English template or exchange-rate handling. There's no setting to toggle; it's a design decision, not a bug.
So what do people actually do?
Most businesses fall back to one of these:
- Export to Excel and rebuild the invoice in English — flexible but slow, and you re-type data that already exists, inviting errors and mismatches with your books.
- Use a separate invoicing tool — some support English/foreign currency, but most make you enter the data again, creating double bookkeeping.
- Reuse your accounting data via a connector — pull the invoice you already created and convert it.
Filling the gap
This is exactly the gap BridgeInvoice addresses. It connects to freee via OAuth (read-only), pulls your existing invoice, and generates a professional English or bilingual PDF — no re-entry. It handles the things freee and MF don't:
- Foreign-currency conversion with a stated exchange rate
- English / Japanese / Korean / Chinese output
- SWIFT, IBAN, and intermediary-bank fields for international transfers
- Cross-border consumption-tax exemption notes
- Withholding tax (源泉徴収) and net-payable
- インボイス-compliant tax breakdown for your domestic clients
(Today it connects to freee; Money Forward support is on the roadmap. MF users can still work from exported data in the meantime.)
Which should you choose?
For domestic accounting, pick whichever you already prefer — both are strong. For English/foreign-currency invoices, neither is sufficient on its own. The most efficient setup is to keep your accounting in freee (or MF) and layer a connector on top to produce the international invoices, rather than maintaining a parallel Excel process.
Summary
freee closed its Custom Template door; Money Forward never opened a foreign-currency one. Both remain great for Japanese bookkeeping but leave English invoicing unsolved. Rather than re-typing into Excel, reuse the data you already have to generate compliant, professional international invoices.