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Fifty markets. Fifty deadlines. One shared inbox.
How Stichd stopped managing tax compliance from memory.
When your VAT registrations span more than 50 countries and you ship to every continent, the gap between "probably fine" and a six-figure penalty is smaller than most tax teams want to admit.
TL;DR
Two people. Fifty markets.
Two people. Fifty markets.
One platform keeping processes in check.
Stichd manages licensed fashion for Puma, Calvin Klein, and Tommy Hilfiger across 50+ markets. Their tax team ran everything through Excel and email — tracking deadlines, chasing external advisors, and hoping nothing slipped. With Keeyns, every VAT deadline, consultant task, and compliance filing lives in one place. Frank and Nikita both start and end their day in the platform. Missed deadlines are down. Sleepless nights too.
Voices
Frank Peeters
Tax manager
Nikita Agarwal
Tax specialist
Stichd manages licensed fashion & sportswear, part of PUMA Group.
Scope
VAT registrations across
50+ jurisdictions
Use cases
-
VAT compliance.
-
External advisor coordination.
-
Deadline management.
- Audit trail & document storage.
Team
2 person tax team, working with multiple external advisors and internal finance teams.
THE PROBLEM
Excel is great - until it isn't
Stichd manages licensed fashion essentials — body wear, lac wear, swimwear — under brands including Puma, Calvin Klein, and Tommy Hilfiger. From a single warehouse in Tilburg, it ships B2B and B2C to more than 50 markets worldwide. That's 50+ VAT registrations, 50+ sets of local deadlines, and 50+ external advisors who need chasing.
Before Keeyns, the answer to all of that was Excel. Which works fine right up until the moment it doesn't. Trackers without audit trails. Reminders that lived in someone's head. Deadlines buried in tabs that no one checked on a particular Tuesday.
The risk wasn't theoretical. Miss a payment in the wrong jurisdiction and the penalty is immediate — sometimes 100%. And Stichd, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the PUMA Group, has more to answer for than just the fine.
"Excel is a wonderful tool, but it's not specifically designed for these kind of tasks. You're always worried — have you updated the tracker? Maybe someone changed something and you don't see it. And if you miss deadlines, there are costs associated."
– Nikita Agarwal, Tax Specialist, Stichd
THE SOLUTION
Building a compliance workflow that actually travels
The search for a workflow tool started before Frank joined. By the time he arrived, Stichd had already selected Keeyns. What he found was a team that had moved quickly — and a platform where the onboarding hadn't turned into a project.
Nikita led the implementation. The task was to collect all the existing compliance information — deadlines, entities, local advisors — and map it into workflows. The insight she landed on: build one workflow properly, and the rest follow the same pattern.
The more meaningful change was structural. Local consultants — handling VAT returns in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and a dozen other jurisdictions where Stichd doesn't have in-house expertise — are now inside the platform. They have tasks. Those tasks have deadlines. If a deadline passes without action, the system flags it. "Otherwise," Frank noted, "you have it all in your head. And that's one point where something goes wrong."
For comparison: the SAP implementation Stichd ran in late 2023 took months and pulled in resources across the organisation. The Keeyns rollout was the opposite. Questions answered immediately. Workflows live in days, not quarters.
"Once you have a workflow for one process, it's most likely similar for the other. The platform is intuitive — like a mobile app you download and are hands-on with after a few days."
– Nikita Agarwal, Tax Specialist, Stichd
RESULTS
The Monday morning feeling is gone
Nikita's benchmark for the change is specific: fewer sleepless nights. Not because the compliance universe got simpler — it didn't — but because she's no longer the one holding it all together manually. The platform sends the reminders. She's not constantly wondering whether she forgot to.
For Frank, the word that keeps coming up is control. He's already thinking about phase two: using Keeyns for corporate income tax and transfer pricing once the VAT workflow is fully embedded. The plan is to phase in, not overhaul.
There's also a longer-term bet being made. Tax audits don't come tomorrow — they come five or six years later. Right now, Stichd's compliance communication lives on the platform. When the audit does come, the answer to "show us the trail" won't mean weeks of digging through email archives.
"Single source of truth for our compliance obligations. That's how I'd describe it. And the sense of being in control — that's the most important part."
– Frank Peeters, Tax Manager, Stichd
50+
VAT registrations managed in platform
0
Missed deadlines since going live
497
million euros in revenue
Before
- Compliance tracked across multiple Excel files
- Reminders sent by email — or forgotten entirely
- External advisors chased manually via email
- Audit trail: whatever survived in someone's inbox
After
- Every deadline in one platform, visible at a glance
- Automated reminders to teams
- Consultants have tasks with deadlines in platform
- Full audit trail on the platform.
Sound familiar?
Our customer ambassadors — tax leaders at companies like the ones you just read about — are open to a conversation. We'll arrange the introduction.
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