Rhizome

An accounting firm's client is rarely one company. Individuals own holding companies, holding companies own operating entities, a trust holds a slice of several. Rhizome draws that structure as a graph rather than a tree: owners sit above what they own, every edge carries its percentage, and selecting anyone shows everything upstream and downstream of them with the effective percentage on each node.

It answers the three questions staff actually ask. Who ultimately owns this entity, and at what effective percentage? What does this individual own, directly and through everything in between? And where are the gaps, an entity nobody owns or one whose ownership adds up wrong? The last is a standing issues list, so a structure with an empty one can be sent to the client as correct.

Built for two audiences: the firm that keeps the structure current, and the client who needs to see it. Firm staff edit; clients sign in and read their own structure and nothing else. The palette is light and print-friendly on purpose, because this ends up in front of clients and in engagement binders.

What runs today is a proof of concept. The demo is a fictional family structure of twenty-eight entities and five individuals, kept in application code so no client data is involved anywhere. Firm provisioning, editing against a database, and client invitations are specified and not built, and the name is a working one.