R&D Tax Credit Documentation Support
Claiming an R&D tax credit requires substantiating which activities actually qualified under the applicable test, technological uncertainty, a process of experimentation, and how much time and cost each qualifying project consumed, and that evidence is far stronger and far easier to produce when it's captured as the work happens rather than reconstructed from memory and old project tickets once a year when the credit claim is being prepared. A claim built after the fact from engineers' best recollection of what they worked on eighteen months ago, with no contemporaneous record of the technical uncertainty being addressed, is exactly the kind of documentation weakness that turns a credit claim into a prolonged examination if it's selected for review.
STARTING PRICE
From €799
Complex tier · Multi-system orchestration, custom logic, and higher-volume or higher-risk processing.
Get a quote →Saves roughly 15-30 hrs of documentation assembly per claim cycle, plus a materially stronger, more defensible claim.
How the automation works
We capture R&D project documentation contemporaneously as work happens, tagging project activity against the qualifying criteria your tax advisor has defined, technological uncertainty addressed, experimentation process followed, and tracking time allocation per project from the systems your engineering or product teams already use, rather than asking them to reconstruct it at year-end. Each qualifying project accumulates its own evidence file, technical narrative, time records, cost allocation, throughout the year, and any project claimed for the credit with thin contemporaneous evidence is flagged well before the claim is filed, giving the team a chance to strengthen the documentation while the work and the people who did it are still fresh, not a year after the fact when memories have faded.
Process flow
- 01
Define qualifying criteria trigger
Your tax advisor's defined qualifying criteria, technological uncertainty, experimentation process, are set as the standard project activity is tagged against.
- 02
Capture activity contemporaneously integration
Project activity, technical notes, and time allocation are captured from existing engineering and project systems as work happens, not reconstructed later.
- 03
Tag activity against qualifying criteria ai
Captured activity is tagged against the qualifying criteria, building a running technical narrative for each potentially qualifying project.
- 04
Flag thin documentation ai
A project claimed for the credit with thin or vague contemporaneous evidence is flagged well before the claim is filed, while the work is recent enough to document properly.
- 05
Assemble the credit claim evidence file output
At claim time, each qualifying project's accumulated evidence, narrative, time, cost, is assembled into the documentation package for your tax advisor's claim preparation.
Inputs
- Qualifying R&D criteria from your tax advisor
- Project management and engineering system activity data
- Time allocation data per project
- Cost data per qualifying project
Outputs
- Contemporaneous per-project technical narrative
- Time and cost allocation by qualifying project
- Documentation gap flags ahead of claim filing
- Assembled claim evidence package
Works with
Prefer a fully custom build instead of an off-the-shelf integration? We scope both options during your free consultation — most jobs like this one work fine on standard connectors, but higher-volume or non-standard systems sometimes need bespoke API work, reflected in the complex tier.
Where this goes wrong if you get it wrong
- Documentation reconstructed a year after the work happened, based on an engineer's memory of what they were doing and why, is materially weaker evidence than a contemporaneous record made while the technical uncertainty was actually being worked through, and reviewing authorities weigh contemporaneous evidence far more heavily precisely because it's harder to retroactively frame ordinary work as qualifying research.
- This tool captures and organizes documentation against criteria your tax advisor defines, it does not make the qualification determination itself, whether a specific project genuinely meets the technological uncertainty and experimentation tests is a technical tax judgment that needs to come from your advisor, not be inferred automatically from project tags.
- Time allocation that's estimated in a single end-of-year exercise, an engineer guessing what percentage of their year went to a qualifying project, is both less accurate and less defensible than time captured closer to when the work actually happened, allocation accuracy depends on capturing it contemporaneously from the systems already tracking the work.
- A project that qualifies for part of the year but shifts into routine, non-qualifying maintenance work partway through needs that transition captured, claiming the full project period as qualifying when only part of it genuinely involved the required uncertainty and experimentation overstates the credit and is a common source of adjustment on examination.
Frequently asked questions
Does this determine which projects qualify for the R&D tax credit?
No, qualification is a tax technical judgment made by your tax advisor against the applicable legal test; this captures and organizes contemporaneous evidence against the criteria they define.
How is this better than assembling documentation at year end?
Evidence captured while the work is happening is both more accurate and more credible than a reconstruction based on memory a year later, and reviewing authorities weigh contemporaneous documentation more heavily for exactly that reason.
How is engineer time captured without creating extra work for the team?
Time and project activity are pulled from the systems, project management, ticketing, engineering tools, your team already uses, rather than requiring a separate manual time-tracking exercise for the credit.
What happens if a project's documentation is too thin to support a claim?
It's flagged well ahead of the claim filing deadline, so the documentation can be strengthened while the work is still recent, rather than discovered as a weakness only when the claim is being prepared.