A D2 visa business plan, built the way AIMA actually reads it.

Somewhere on your laptop there's a file called something like "Business Plan Portugal". It has a title, your name, and a heading that says Executive Summary. It's been that way for a while now, because every time you open it, the same questions come back. How long is this supposed to be? What do they actually want to read? How do you write market analysis for a market you haven't lived in yet?

The tempting shortcut is obvious. Ask an AI to write it, get twelve tidy pages back, done by dinner. Here's the problem: the feedback reaching our partner lawyers from the consular side is blunt. Plans that read as AI-generated get rejected. Reviewers see hundreds of these files, and generic text with no real person behind it is one of the fastest ways to lose one.

And the stakes are lopsided. In our partner lawyers' experience, nearly every D2 rejection traces back to the business plan. When a rejection comes, the letter can be a single line, something like "business plan is not credible enough", with no detail on what was missing. There's no feedback loop and one appeal per application. The plan has to be right the first time.

Here's the reassuring part. The ideas that get approved are rarely glamorous. Consultancies, agencies, e-commerce shops, restaurants: ordinary businesses, described honestly. What reviewers reward is realism. What they punish is boilerplate, and ambition your background can't back up. Two years of marketing experience attached to a plan for a fifty-person company reads as fiction. The same experience attached to a proportionate solo consultancy reads as a person who knows what they're doing.

So the plan the partner accountant builds is specific by design. Your actual experience, matched to the scale of your actual idea. Market context from real Portuguese sources, INE, Banco de Portugal, sector associations, rather than paragraphs that could describe any country. Named prospects, existing clients, or signed contracts where you have them, because they move a plan from hypothetical to credible. And a section most self-written plans miss entirely: your economic contribution to Portugal, spelled out plainly, even when your customers are abroad and the contribution is indirect.

The financials follow the same principle. Simple three-year projections, monthly for year one, with every assumption stated. A reviewer isn't an expert in your field and doesn't need to be. They're judging whether the idea is structured, honest, and makes sense. Realism beats polish, every time.