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How Much Time Should My Technical Team Spend on Our R&D Claim?

Your engineers are busy; they don't have time to write reports for R&D tax credits. Yet without their input, you can't complete a compliant claim.

There’s a difficult line to walk when trying to make your R&D tax claim. You need to prepare detailed, accurate project descriptions and cost analysis, while minimising disruption to your teams day-to-day.

However, your claim needn’t be a source of anxiety or a huge sinkhole for staff time. The fear of wasting time is exaggerated, especially if your team knows how to make an efficient claim.

Few activities have the ROI that completing your R&D tax credit claim does. If your team spends 20 hours on a claim that unlocks €100,000, that's €5,000 per hour. How many other activities have guarantee you that reward?

How long do R&D tax credit claims take to prepare?

The honest answer: 5-25 hours total (usually).

Of course, this always depends on the size of your claim, the number and complexity of your projects, how confident your team is in what they need to do and whether you use professional support.

For a typical three-project claim, you can expect the following timeline:

• Initial project identification meeting: 2-4 hours
  • Group discussion with the project technical leads
  • Identify qualifying projects from the past year
  • No detailed documentation yet
• Project descriptions: 4-6 hours total
  • Three projects that need technical reports
  • Explaining your advance, your uncertainties and your methods
  • Depends on the amount of documentation available
• Cost allocation review: 2-4 hours
  • Confirming which team members worked on which projects
  • Using timesheets or accurate estimates to apportion staff time
  • Gathering other eligible R&D costs
• Final review before submission: 2 hours
  • Technical lead reviews completed claim narrative
  • Checks accuracy, adds missing details

Total: 10-16 hours for a three-project claim

This isn't 16 consecutive hours; it's spread across 4-6 weeks, often in hour-long chunks that fit around other project deadlines.

It’s a collaborative approach, with technical teams leading the project descriptions and providing input for the cost analysis, and finance personnel preparing the claim value and filling out the company’s company tax return (CT1).

What does your technical team need to prepare?

Each R&D project needs a full description to explain how it qualifies under Revenue’s definition of R&D. This includes:

• What advance in science or technology were you seeking?
• What scientific or technological uncertainty did you face?
• What was the existing baseline in the field?
• How did you seek to overcome the uncertainty?

If you can effectively communicate these answers with robust evidence, you’re well on your way to defending your eligibility.

You don’t need to write a full academic paper; Revenue’s reviewers are unlikely to be experts in your field and will appreciate a layman’s description far more than a white paper. You also needn’t describe every hour of your team’s time. A thematic review of the work done in the period, focusing on the big challenges and the results of your experimentation is more suitable for your claim.

Why technical input actually matters for your claim

To make a valid R&D tax credit claim, you need to submit your claim through your CT1. However, Revenue’s guidelines specify that you must also have sufficient evidence of your eligibility.

Revenue has the right to open an R&D aspect query into your claim up to five years after submission. The possibility of an erroneous claim is high, from small miscalculations to large chunks of ineligible costs being included. Revenue is also aware of the risk of fraud, as claimants do not need to submit their evidence when they formally make their claim.

Should your claim be investigated, having robust reports ready in advance will dramatically cut down on headaches and ensure that you avoid having to repay your credit or, worse, pay any penalties for submitting an incorrect claim.

So why does your busy technical team need to get involved? First off, they have the most detail and context of the R&D done, being the team that actually carried out the work. Your technical reports will be much stronger with their specifics than second hand from teams that weren’t involved.

For example, a CTO needed to explain how they overcame the poor visibility associated with data silos of structured and unstructured data in their efforts to generate better AI insights. Their description of the uncertainty, the specific improvements sought, and the methodologies employed would be much richer than can be communicated by team members not involved in the project.

Secondly, using your R&D team to prepare the project descriptions speeds up the process of preparing your claim. No more telephone games, with engineers providing information to the finance team to write up. Even with robust documentation, the research and effort required by the team to prepare the report is likely to much longer than straight from the horse’s mouth.

Your senior developer earns roughly €60/hour. Spending 8 hours on a €75,000 claim costs you €480 in their time but secures €75,000 in tax credits. That's a 156:1 return.

How to get technical input without disrupting your team

Though the ROI of getting your team involved should be clear at this point, it’s still important to minimise disruption wherever possible. Below, you’ll find some suggestions for how to reduce impact to your team’s daily workload.

Tip 1: Align with existing rituals

Schedule discussions of R&D regularly (e.g., during sprint retrospectives, or at quarterly reviews). You can gather crucial information for your R&D claim while carrying out other important admin.

Asking what problems were solved this quarter in these reviews will capture the information when it’s fresh, building on the strength of your claim and ensuring no projects are missed.

Tip 2: Use asynchronous communication

It doesn’t need to be said, but tech teams are busy. Though meetings might suit leadership more, you may find that your developers and engineers can answer structured questions sent via email, Slack or Teams with more precision and detail.

This also suits busy working patterns better; spending 15 minutes explaining an authentication challenge is probably easier than a deep dive for an hour in a boardroom without all the documentation to hand.

Tip 3: Start with a placeholder draft

Using draft outlines can give your tech team a better idea of where to start with their claim. Many R&D tax advisers work this way when meetings aren’t possible. It’s easier to correct inaccuracies than it is to come up with all the necessary information in one go.

Tip 4: Record conversations

You may find that a series of 60-minute meetings with structured questions allow you to drill down into the project details; this method is a favourite of R&D tax advisers.

The meeting is then recorded or transcribed, allowing the adviser (or other team members) to structure the conversation into a qualifying project description. This is a great way to get a solid first draft that needs minor revisions and additions without taking up massive chunks of time.

What if your team genuinely doesn't have time?

If your team genuinely cannot spare 10-20 hours across a quarter for a six-figure tax credit, that's a capacity crisis worth addressing separately. However, if you’d rather outsource this work or use tools to decrease your workload, the Irish market has a few.

R&D tax credit software tools, like Tax Cloud, come pre-loaded with the specific structured questions that your team needs to answer (as well as templates for your finance team to input, analyse and track their costs). Some tools even have R&D tax advisers reviewing your claim behind the scenes and asking for further details. These tools are a good middle ground between cost, time investment and claim strength.

Alternatively, you may want a completely hands-off approach. Using professional R&D tax advisers doesn’t completely remove the need for your team (advisers aren’t mind readers, after all!) but decreases their involvement significantly. However, the peace of mind and time saved does come at a higher price point than a DIY or software-supported claim.

Convincing your team to get on board

Even with all your efforts, it can still be hard to convince your team that your R&D tax credit is a valuable use of their time.

The good news is that your claim gets easier to make every year! A long-term perspective will incentivise a first-year investment of time.

You’ll need to emphasise that the work required from them is accessible; no one is asking your team to learn tax law, just to describe their work.

Your R&D tax claim will fund your technical team’s next hire, their new tools or the next conference. A robust claim is a surefire way to increase your cashflow which directly improves their work lives.

You can try a message to your CTO or tech lead like this:

Sarah, I need your help securing roughly €85,000 in R&D tax credits. This requires about 10 hours of your team's time explaining the technical challenges on projects X, Y, and Z. I've created templates and can work around your sprint schedule. The ROI is roughly €8,500 per hour of their time. Can we find a time next week to discuss approach?

Conclusion

Your technical team probably needs to spend 5-15 hours on your R&D tax credit claim - far less than most Finance Directors fear. The key is asking them to do the right things: explaining technical challenges they've already solved, not creating new documentation from scratch.

Want to see exactly what technical input Tax Cloud requires? Book a demo to see our templates and question structure or try our R&D tax credit calculator to estimate your claim.