Be Prepared, and You Can Save Time, Effort, and Money.
If your company relies on the hard sciences or uses technology to create or improve products or processes, you might be able to reduce your federal taxes by a portion of the costs incurred using the Research & Development (R&D) Tax Credit. The credit can be significant and many types of companies potentially qualify. Smart preparation early in the process can also save you time, effort and, potentially, tax dollars.
Best Practices WhenExploring the R&D Tax Credit
Reach out to qualified professionals to discuss the credit.
Find out if this professional has experience with the R&D Credit. Have they worked with companies similar to yours? They should ask about your new product(s) or innovation(s), your employees’ time associated with those developments, and if you retain rights to what you developed. Being mindful that your time is valuable, an experienced professional can often make a preliminary assessment in the first meeting as to the likelihood your company is eligible for the R&D credit or provide the preliminary questions needed in order to make that assessment.
Set up a meeting at your facility.
A walk-through helps immensely to educate your chosen consultant. That time walking through your plant or watching your prototype in action tells them a lot about your operations and, in turn, your potential to qualify for the R&D credit. Plan to set aside an hour to three hours, approximately (includes meeting time after the walk-through).
Have your subject matter experts easily accessible to discuss potential R&D activities.
These persons can be your employees or even outside contractors most connected to the development. Not having the right people involved as soon as possible in the exploratory process can negatively impact the amount of credit that you ultimately claim.
Understand that you’re trying to qualify for the tax definition of R&D.
We recently visited a manufacturing company where the chief technology officer claimed the company was doing no R&D. Of course the firm was constantly researching and developing as they were coming out with new products each year and making significant functional improvements to their existing products.
We helped him to understand that the definitionof R&D for tax purposes might not match his scientific definition. This a pro-taxpayer credit: The tax definition of R&D can be more liberal and more encompassing than some traditional engineering minds might think.
That same company also experienced a year where technical challenges and other factors kept many of their developments from getting to market. They thought they had no activities to potentially quality for the R&D credit—but failure can be a positive when claiming a credit. It doesn’t mean you have no qualified R&D expenses—it can actually help show that R&D did occur.
Have your documentation ready.
Any contemporaneous documentation that monitors the activities qualifying as research activities will help to support your claim for the credit: blueprints or marketing materials, project write ups, financial information, status reports, modifications’ specs, and so on. (See our recent blog regarding proper documentation when exploring qualification for the R&D Tax Credit.)
Lack of documentation or no documentation makes the process of exploring your qualification for the R&D credit more involved; however, it is often possible to reconstruct information needed to claim the credit.
Talk to our experts today about your business’s potential to claim the R&D credit.
