Insight

Every founder we talk to has the wrong idea about this one. Some think it is only for biotech and people in lab coats. Others think building anything new automatically qualifies. Both are wrong. It has nothing to do with what you built. It is about whether you were solving something with a genuinely uncertain outcome, and whether you can prove it after the fact.

Before you even call an accountant, run your project through this:

• Did you actually know how to solve it going in? If a decent developer could look at the problem and see the path, it is not R&D. Doesn't matter how new or flashy the feature sounds.
• Did you hit real dead ends? A claim needs experimentation. Trying something, watching it not work, and changing approach because of that is the whole point. If your build went in a straight line from start to finish, that is a hard sell.
• Was the uncertainty technical, or was it just "will people use this"? Not knowing if customers will like a feature is a business bet, not R&D. The unknown has to be about whether the software could actually do what you needed it to do.
• Did you write anything down at the time? Notes, commit messages, a Slack thread arguing about why an approach failed, anything dated from when it actually happened. If you are trying to reconstruct it six months later from memory, you have already lost the claim.
• Can you separate the experimental bit from the rest? Most projects are mostly ordinary work with one hard problem buried in the middle. The standard integrations and CRUD screens next to it don't count just because they're in the same codebase. You need to isolate the actual hours.

Here is the part that trips people up most: a plain looking website can have a legitimate claim buried in it if part of the build genuinely stumped you, and a shiny new framework can have zero claimable R&D if the path to build it was obvious the whole time. The label on the project means nothing. What happened while you were building it is what matters.

One more thing: this is not tax advice, it is a starting point. If a few of these hit close to home, get a proper R&D tax advisor involved before you register anything.

Still have questions? Give us a call, book a quick meeting, or send us a message to understand more without any pushy sales tactics.