Data Visualisation in Tax

Tax and finance teams use an excessive amount of dashboards. The contents are often limited to simple bar charts and histograms. However, tax data is multi-dimensional which means the simple two-dimensional representations may no longer be sufficient.

I believe modern data visualisation in tax should increasingly serve the users with more depth in that it could allow users to:

• interact with data, explore and tell a story from the data, and/or;
• directly enable an action point from the visualisation

I explain this thinking with an example in transfer pricing below.

Using an interactive chord diagram to represent intercompany cross border transactions

In transfer pricing, I deal with a lot of cross-border intercompany transactions. Due to tax rate variance in different countries, there is a need to examine these transactions carefully to understand the pricing of it and ensure fair tax bases in respective countries. Typically these are documented in the long, messy spreadsheets in Excel. I was inspired by the chord diagram application in marketing to explain brand loyalty by Nadieh Bremer and applied it to transfer pricing transactions. Here is the demo I made using an interactive chord diagram to represent cross border service transactions.

*All data used were simulated.