RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT SOFTWARE

With the pace at which the world of software development moves, and the complexity of the different jargon used, it was perhaps destined to be one of the trickiest areas for R&D incentives advisers to tackle when it comes to identifying R&D tax relief opportunities.

And they’re not the only ones that have been left confused by the R&D guidelines. HMRC themselves have drafted in their IT gurus to help their own specialist R&D incentives inspectors to ensure they stay up to speed on the industry’s advances and the IT gurus have also been helping to review claims.

Almost every business will be doing some sort of activity that meets the criteria for claiming the incentives. But sadly, a lot of these businesses are missing out, either completely by making no claim at all, or in part, by not including everything they can. And with up to 33.35% cashback available on qualifying R&D spend, that’s criminal!

WHAT TYPE OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS CAN QUALIFY FOR R&D TAX CREDITS?

The key parts of your projects to consider in respect of whether you will qualify for R&D incentives include:

SOFTWARE

WHY IS RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT IMPORTANT IN SOFTWARE INDUSTRIES?

It’s essential that businesses within the software industry are driven by innovation to ensure they are remaining competitive in their ever-changing world. Developing new products, or improving existing ones, is a vital part of any software company’s operation. We’ve spoken to hundreds of software businesses that think they don’t qualify for the relief, which makes the eureka moment all the sweeter when we show them how they can.

That’s because R&D boils down to two qualifying criteria. In very straightforward terms, you should be looking at R&D closely if 1) You’ve CHANGED something (anything) in terms of what you make, how you make it, or you’ve added to your technical knowledge pool; AND 2) There have been CHALLENGES in order to make those changes work, i.e. it’s taken some thought, some time and some testing.