For businesses that know they can make an R&D Tax Claim it might feel like you have all the time in the world prior to submitting that claim. With a deadline of 2 years AFTER the end of the accounting year in which you incurred the costs, the pressure isn’t really on. But should it be?
Well the truth is yes. Planning early for your R&D claim be very advantageous, leading to a larger claim value and less risk of the claim being challenged.
Depending on the complexity of the project there may be several costs involved – the more estimations that are made, the less accurate the claim.
Here’s an example of the impact it can have on your businesses claim:
Meet Our Client – Holiday & Leisure Business
This client came to us, as they’d prepared an R&D claim for themselves, but they were really struggling to make the time to claim. Unfortunately, they’d missed deadlines and had lost out on money back into their business.
When we checked out their previous claim they were working with an existing subcontracted developer on a number of different things: maintenance & server work, website builds in other countries and finally the website build qualifying for R&D. However, the subcontractor wasn’t separating out the R&D work on their invoices. Nightmare.
As a result, they’d spent at least 4 hours going through every invoice to estimate what related to the R&D project. The business estimated the time spent by the subcontractor over the last 3-year period, as 50%.
The subcontractor had an average annual fee of around £50K/annum.
Working together for the future claim, we setup appropriate systems for clearly identifying the time spent by the contractor on R&D project work. For the client, this was through making changes to their invoicing system, taking only 30 mins to setup.
When calculating the Subcontractors actual time spent for the next claim, it was recorded at 65%.
That’s an additional £2,500 cash back, from, just 30 mins of accounts work.
LET’S START NOW
We will work with your business, to establish the right systems now to monitor your all of your project costs. Keeping in touch quarterly we’ll check these are still working for your business and make any required changes – we want to help maximise your claim.
Through establishing the right systems, the value of your claim is likely to increase. You’ll also have the peace of mind you’re claiming the right amount: no under, or over claiming.
Comments