Visualising Cross-Border Tax Structures for Multinational Clients

Tax advisory work lives and dies by the diagram. In the Netherlands, where holding structures are woven into the fabric of international tax planning, the ability to communicate a corporate ownership chain clearly can make or break a client relationship. A Benelux-based tax consultancy — one of the region's most respected transfer pricing and holding structure specialists, with offices in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Brussels — produced hundreds of corporate structure diagrams each year. Every new client engagement, every restructuring proposal, every annual review required a fresh visual representation of the ownership chain, annotated with tax rates, treaty positions, and flow-of-funds arrows.

The firm had been built over three decades by a group of partners who valued intellectual rigour above all else. Their analyses were impeccable. But the way those analyses were communicated had not evolved in years. The firm employed a small in-house design team — two graphic designers and a production assistant — whose primary job was translating advisors' handwritten sketches and Excel models into polished Visio and PowerPoint diagrams. On a busy week, the design queue held thirty or more requests, and turnaround times stretched to five working days.

The designers spent roughly 60% of their time on ownership chain diagrams, working from a combination of scribbled notes, email instructions, and Excel exports. The process was manual, repetitive, and — crucially — disconnected from the underlying data. When an advisor changed an ownership percentage in their analysis, the designer had to be notified separately to update the chart. Version control was managed through file naming conventions that had grown baroque: 'ClientX_Structure_v3_FINAL_revised_KJ_comments.pptx' was not an unusual filename. Errors crept in. Partners occasionally presented outdated diagrams to clients, discovering the mistake only when the client pointed out a discrepancy.

The managing partner first encountered Juristic Structure at a tax conference in The Hague, where a colleague from a competing firm mentioned in passing that they had 'stopped using Visio entirely.' Intrigued, he arranged a demonstration for the firm's senior team. The reaction was immediate and, for a group of cautious Dutch tax advisors, surprisingly enthusiastic. The ability to build a structure diagram that was simultaneously the data model and the visual output addressed a frustration they had lived with for years but never articulated clearly.

The pilot began with a single engagement: a restructuring proposal for a Dutch-headquartered multinational with subsidiaries in twelve jurisdictions. The lead advisor built the existing ownership structure in Juristic Structure in a single afternoon, importing entity data from a spreadsheet and arranging the hierarchy on-screen. Ownership percentages, jurisdictional flags, and treaty-relevant annotations were added directly to each node. The result was a live, interactive diagram that the advisor could manipulate, filter, and explore — without involving the design team at all.

When the restructuring proposal required modelling three alternative holding configurations, the advisor duplicated the workspace three times, modified each copy, and presented all four versions — current state plus three options — to the client the following morning. Under the old process, producing three alternative diagrams would have consumed the design team for a week and generated twelve new PowerPoint files. The client, a CFO accustomed to receiving static slides, spent twenty minutes exploring the interactive diagrams on her laptop and asked questions about specific entities that she had never raised in previous meetings. 'For the first time,' she told the advisor, 'I can actually see what you are recommending.'

Adoption across the firm followed a pattern that surprised the partners. It was not the youngest advisors who embraced the tool first, but the most experienced ones — the partners and senior managers who had spent decades sketching structures on whiteboards and knew exactly what they wanted the diagram to show. Juristic Structure gave them the ability to build the diagram themselves, in real time, during client meetings. One senior partner began conducting advisory sessions with Structure open on a shared screen, building the proposed holding chain live as the discussion progressed. Clients found this approach compelling: they could see the structure take shape and ask questions at each step.

The design team's role transformed rather than disappeared. Freed from the repetitive production of ownership chain diagrams, they redirected their efforts toward client-facing presentation materials, thought leadership graphics, and the firm's brand identity work — tasks that had been perpetually deprioritised when the diagram queue was full. The production assistant, who had spent most of her time managing version control and chasing approvals, moved into a client-facing operations role. The firm estimates that manual charting effort fell by 60% within the first six months.

The accuracy improvement was, in the partners' assessment, even more valuable than the time savings. Because the diagram in Juristic Structure is the data — not a visual interpretation of separate data — there is no longer a gap between the analysis and its representation. When an advisor updates an ownership percentage, the diagram reflects the change instantly. When a new entity is added to the structure, it appears in every view and export. The partners noted that they had not fully appreciated how many errors the old process introduced until the errors stopped occurring.

The firm's transfer pricing team found a particularly valuable use case in documenting intercompany transaction flows. By layering financial flow arrows onto the ownership structure, they could produce a single diagram that showed both the legal hierarchy and the economic substance of the group's arrangements — a document that transfer pricing auditors increasingly demanded. Producing this combined view in Visio had been so time-consuming that it was rarely attempted; in Structure, it became a standard deliverable.

Client adoption of the shared Juristic links exceeded expectations. Several of the firm's largest clients — multinational groups with structures spanning twenty or more jurisdictions — now receive quarterly structure updates via shared links rather than static PDFs. The clients' in-house tax teams access the live diagrams between meetings, using them as reference tools when local advisors in other jurisdictions ask questions about the group's holding chain. One client's head of tax described the shared workspace as 'the single most useful thing our external advisors have ever given us.'

The competitive impact became apparent within the first year. In two competitive pitches for new mandates, the firm presented its advisory approach using live Structure demonstrations rather than static pitch decks. Both pitches were successful, and in both cases the client cited the visual clarity of the firm's approach as a differentiating factor. The managing partner, who had initially approved the Juristic investment as a cost-saving measure, began describing it as a revenue driver.

The firm has since standardised on Juristic Structure for all client-facing structural work. New advisors are trained on Structure during their first week, and the firm's engagement letter templates now include a clause offering clients a shared Juristic workspace as part of the advisory package. The design team, far from resenting the change, has become one of its strongest advocates — they are now doing the creative work they were hired to do, rather than spending their days moving boxes around in Visio.

Looking ahead, the firm is exploring the use of Structure's API to connect their diagrams with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce registry, enabling automatic updates when entities are incorporated or dissolved. The managing partner's ambition is characteristically measured: 'We want to get to a place where our structure diagrams are never wrong. Not approximately right — never wrong. Structure is taking us there.'