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Who reports to whom, who owns what: getting the org chart out of PowerPoint

Two org charts, two obligations, and a good reason to draw them from your address book

TL;DR: two org charts answer two different questions, and no single tool draws both. Who reports to whom is a tree: one person, one manager, the facts inside the box. Who owns what is a graph: one company, several holders, a percentage written on every link. Since March 31, 2023, most businesses registered in Quebec must declare their ultimate beneficiaries to the Registraire, indirect holdings included, and Ottawa has been publishing part of its own register since January 22, 2024. Odoo Community already draws your employees, but neither your address book nor your ownership structure. We wrote the two charts that were missing, and they read the records you already keep.


In this article

Since 2023, the annual update declaration asks for the name of every ultimate beneficiary of the business, the date they became one, and the percentage that makes them one. For a company with two shareholders, you can answer from memory. For a group where a holding company owns 60% of the operating company, where a family trust carries the rest as non-voting class B shares, and where the building belongs to a limited partnership owned by both, memory becomes a risky source.

The answer does exist somewhere. In a PowerPoint file redone for a bank meeting three years ago. In the accountant's head. In a spreadsheet whose last edit carries the name of someone who left. And that is not even the same problem as the other org chart, the one with people on it, pinned in the hallway and out of date since the spring reorganisation.


Two org charts everyone mixes up

Both carry the same name and both are drawn with boxes and lines. The resemblance ends there.

The people chart is a tree. Everyone has one manager, exactly one, and everything that matters is read inside the box: the name, the role, the employer. The drawing folds and unfolds by level, and the line only ever says "above".

The ownership chart is not a tree. A company has several holders, each for a share. And the essential fact sits in neither box: it is written on the link. Two shareholders at 50-50 and two shareholders at 99-1 produce exactly the same boxes. What tells the two situations apart lives on the arrows. Add that ownership crosses (company A owns B, B owns C, and A also owns C directly) and that it skips levels, and you have a shape a tree cannot represent.

A tool built to fold a tree therefore does not draw a graph. This is not a missing feature, it is a question of shape.

People org chart and ownership org chart Diagram comparing the two org charts. On the left, the people chart: one question, who reports to whom, one manager per person, the facts inside the box, and a drawing that folds like a tree. On the right, the ownership chart: who owns what, several holders per company, the facts on the link, and a drawing that crosses and skips levels. People org chart Who reports to whom One manager per person The facts sit in the box It folds like a tree Ownership org chart Who owns what Several holders per company The facts sit on the link It crosses and it skips levels Two different shapes, so two different drawings.


Since 2023, knowing who owns what is no longer an internal matter

Quebec's corporate transparency act, passed on June 8, 2021, amended the Act respecting the legal publicity of enterprises. Since March 31, 2023, most businesses required to register in Quebec must declare their ultimate beneficiaries to the Registraire: for-profit private legal persons, partnerships, natural persons operating a sole proprietorship, and trusts carrying on a commercial business. Exempt are non-profits, public legal persons, reporting issuers, the financial institutions covered by the act, associations within the meaning of the Civil Code and, by regulation, condominium syndicates.

The threshold is 25% or more of the voting rights, or 25% or more of the fair market value of the shares. Held or controlled, directly or indirectly. Add the agreements by which several people undertake to exercise their voting rights together and cross the threshold as a group, plus de facto control, which appears on no share certificate.

For each ultimate beneficiary, the business declares the condition that makes them one, the percentage where applicable, and the date they became one or stopped being one. All three can be looked up in the register by anyone.

The passage worth your attention is not the threshold, it is the standard of effort. The Registraire's own guide says it plainly: a business must do "more than take reasonable steps", it must take every step required to trace and identify its ultimate beneficiaries, following a legal, documentary and factual analysis. In practice: "we did not know" is not an answer, and a list of direct shareholders is not an analysis.

Federally, corporations governed by the Canada Business Corporations Act keep a register of individuals with significant control. Since January 22, 2024, that information is filed with Corporations Canada and part of it becomes public. It is updated at least once a year, with the annual return, and within 15 days of the corporation learning of a change. The threshold matches Quebec's: 25%, or de facto control.

Fifteen days is a short window for information that lives in a slide.

The corporate transparency dates Vertical timeline in four steps. On June 8, 2021, Quebec passes its corporate transparency act. On March 31, 2023, declaring ultimate beneficiaries becomes mandatory. On January 22, 2024, the federal register of individuals with significant control becomes partly public. A change must be recorded there within fifteen days. 1 June 8, 2021 Quebec passes its corporate transparency act Bill 78 2 March 31, 2023 Declaring ultimate beneficiaries becomes mandatory Registraire 3 January 22, 2024 The federal ISC register becomes partly public Corporations Canada 4 Within 15 days Federal deadline to record a change in the register CBCA Same threshold on both sides: 25% of voting rights or of fair market value.


The other org chart decides your succession

In January 2023, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business published the results of a survey of 2,479 Canadian business owners, run between June and August 2022. Three numbers deserve to be read together.

First: 76% of owners plan to leave their business within ten years, which represents more than two trillion dollars in business assets changing hands. Second: 9% have a formal written succession plan, 45% an informal one, and 46% have no plan at all. Third, and this is the one that matters here: among the obstacles to planning, 39% of owners cite the fact that the business depends too much on their active involvement, and 36% that running it takes all their time.

Those last two are not moods, they are structures. A business that leans too hard on its owner shows up in a drawing: every arrow climbs toward one box, and none of them stops halfway. The potential buyer sees it too, at a glance, and that is exactly what weighs on the price they will offer. Drawing the chain of command does not fix the dependency, but it is the only way to look at it before someone else notices it for you.

The same drawing earns its keep on ordinary days. Who decides during the operations director's three weeks off? Who signs if the controller is on sick leave? We have already written about transferring login information in case of incapacity or death. The org chart is the organisational version of the same question.

What blocks succession planning Bar chart of the obstacles cited by SMB owners. Finding a buyer: 54%. Valuing the business: 43%. The business depends too much on the owner's active involvement: 39%. No time: 36%. Financing the deal: 30%. Finding a buyer 54% Valuing the business 43% Depends on the owner 39% No time left 36% Financing the deal 30% CFIB, 2023, survey of 2,479 business owners.


The file has one flaw, it does not know who left

Draw.io, Visio, a slide: these are good drawing tools, and we have already said what we like about Draw.io. A drawing is still a drawing. It does not know that the administration director left in March, that her role was split in two, or that a new shareholder came into the capital in July. It is not wrong: it is unaware. And nobody notices by looking at it, because an out-of-date org chart looks exactly like a current one.

The second flaw is quieter: duplication. The name, the role and the employer are already entered in your address book. Retyping them into a slide creates a second source of truth, and the day the two sources disagree, neither one is believed.


What Odoo already draws, and where it stops

Odoo does not start from nothing. The hr_org_chart module ships under the LGPL-3 licence, so it is part of the Community edition, and it installs itself alongside the Employees application. It shows the manager, the manager's manager and the direct reports on an employee record, plus an Org Chart entry in the application's Employees menu. If your need stops at drawing your own team and that team is already entered as employees, there is nothing to add and nothing to buy. This is one of the places where the Community versus Enterprise question does not come into play.

Two walls appear as soon as you step outside that frame.

The first one is a single word: employees. The people an engagement asks you to map are often someone else's. A client's management team, an organisation's board, a supplier's structure, the directors of a group under review. Those people live in the address book, not in the payroll module, and they have no business being entered there.

The second wall is one of shape. Odoo's hierarchy view follows a single parent link folded on itself: every box has one parent, exactly one. That is precisely what a tree needs and precisely what fails for ownership, where the percentage lives on the link and where a company has several parents. There is no setting to find, and no configuration screen to dig through.


Two org charts drawn from the address book

We wrote three modules: a drawing engine, and two charts that build on it.

The engine computes the geometry once and renders it two ways, on screen and as a vector PDF in your own brand colours. The text stays selectable and each box links back to its record. One geometry, two renderings: the document you hand the client is the drawing you are looking at, not an enlarged screenshot.

The people chart adds a "Reports to" field on a contact record. Why a new field, when Odoo already knows how to attach a contact to a company? Because that attachment says where the person works, and nothing else. Repurposing it to mean "reports to" has an effect nothing announces: Odoo then copies the parent's address onto the child record, silently. Working somewhere and reporting to someone are two separate facts, and they deserve two fields.

The ownership chart adds a link between a holder and a company held. That link carries the percentage, the class of shares, the voting right, an effective date, an end date and the source of the information: public registry, client statement, shareholders' agreement, or an estimate still to be validated.

Those three are not decoration. The effective date, because an agreement signed today for next January is recorded today and only counts from its own date. A share that gets replaced is closed with an end date rather than stacked: two open lines for the same pair would push the total above one hundred on a perfectly correct structure. The source, because the law asks you to declare the condition, not just the name. "Estimate to be validated" exists precisely so you can record what you believe you know without giving it more weight than it has. The voting right, because 40% without a vote and 40% with one do not produce the same ultimate beneficiary.

The screen adds it up and says so: complete structure, partial structure, or a total above one hundred. A partial total is not an error. It is the normal state of a file in progress, and refusing to record 60% until you know the other 40 would mean recording nothing at all.

What one ownership line carries Diagram of an Ownership tab, not a screenshot. It shows two holders with their percentage and their class of shares, a share closed with an end date, the total recorded capital and the state of the structure. Fabrication Nordet inc.: Ownership tab Gestion Nordet inc., 60%, voting shares in force Nordet family trust, 40%, class B no voting right Share replaced in 2021 closed Dec. 31, 2021 Recorded capital 100% Structure state complete Every line carries its source: registry, agreement, statement or estimate.


What this does not solve

An ownership chart is not a securities register, not a minute book, and not evidence. It is what you know, with the source behind each piece of it, and the footer of every output says so.

It does not produce your declaration to the Registraire either, nor your register of individuals with significant control. It gives you the material to prepare them and to defend them, which is not nothing against a standard that demands every step required. The declaration stays your move, and your notary stays your notary.

Entry is manual. No integration reads shareholders' agreements for you, ours included.

A drawing has a legibility limit. Past a few hundred boxes, the page is refused rather than produced as a poster nobody can read, and you are pointed back to a subsidiary as a starting point.

Finally, the discipline stays human. Someone has to close the line the day a share changes hands, and tick the new manager the day a role moves. The tool makes the gesture possible, quick and visible. It does not make it for you.

A group structure rarely documents itself on a Tuesday afternoon. If yours lives in a file nobody dares open, we can rebuild it with you and put it in your ERP: our Odoo modules are designed so that data has a single home.


Where to start

What we suggest to an SMB starting from scratch, in this order:

  1. One company to begin with, not the whole group.
  2. People first: three or four records, the "Reports to" field, nothing else.
  3. Ownership next: one line per holder, with its effective date and its source.
  4. Compare the total you get with the capital you thought you knew. The gap is the information.
  5. Export the PDF and have your accountant or notary read it, before the next declaration.

That sequence takes an hour for a simple company and half a day for a group of five entities. The turning point is not the data entry, it is step 4: that is where approximate structures reveal themselves, and it is far more comfortable to find that out in your own office than on the phone with an auditor.


At Blue Fox

We deploy Odoo Community, hosted in Quebec, and we write what is missing rather than asking for a licence to get it. The three org chart modules are published on GitHub under the BUSL-1.1 licence: the code is readable, auditable, and you can run it. They are part of Symbifox, our assembly of Odoo Community for Quebec SMBs and non-profits.

If you are at the point of hunting for who owns what in a file nobody dares open, let's talk about your structure. We start by looking at what you have before talking about software.


Sources

Your contact is away: knowing before you hit send, not three days later
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