FREE CHECKLIST
R and D Claim Checklist
About an hour against your projects and your ledger before anyone drafts a claim: the gateway tests that decide whether there is a claim at all, the two deadlines that kill claims outright, and the evidence file an enquiry will one day ask for.
- The gateway: uncertainty, advance and the competent professional, honestly applied
- The deadlines: the six-month claim notification and the Additional Information Form
- The file: monthly apportionments, cost categories and enquiry readiness, kept as you go
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Who this checklist is for
First real development spend, period just closed
Your first period of real development spend has just closed. The claim notification window is open for six months and no longer; diarise it this week and start the evidence file while the uncertainty is still fresh.
An agent says everything qualifies
The pitch is that everything qualifies and the fee is a percentage. Run the gateway section before signing anything: commission-written claims are the ones now being clawed back with penalties.
The claim is in and HMRC has questions
The claim went in and HMRC has opened an enquiry. The readiness section is the test you should have run first: records producible within a month, a named competent professional who can talk about the work fluently.
FACTS
The merged scheme pays a 20 per cent credit on qualifying spend, and the credit is itself taxable: a profit-maker nets 15 per cent, a loss-maker about 16.2. On £180,000 of spend that is £36,000 gross and £27,000 or £29,160 net, and the numbers only exist if the deadlines were met.
£27,000
netted by a profit-maker on £180,000 of qualifying spend
six months
the claim notification window after the period of account ends
FACTS
Loss-making and spending at least 30 per cent of total costs on R and D reaches ERIS instead: an 86 per cent extra deduction and a 14.5 per cent credit, worth up to 26.97p per pound, £48,546 on the same £180,000. The intensity test is worth running every single period.