When it comes to submitting your claim for R&D Tax Credits you essentially have three choices:

• Do it yourself
• Let your accountant do it for you
• Utilise the services of a specialist R&D Tax Credits consultancy to prepare and submit the claim on your behalf.

We are probably a little biased on this point, but option c) would always be our recommended route and here’s why.

In our experience the DIY approach always ends up leaving something on the table. No matter how diligent and competent your team, R&D Tax Credits is not your core function. You will know everything there is to know about manufacturing or engineering or software development, but how can you possibly know everything about a highly specialised area of tax?

When companies try to submit their own R&D Tax Credits they inevitably do not maximise the amount of money that they could actually claim; they struggle to meet the deadlines for submission as they have their “day job” to contend with and there is no reporting structure put in place to make future claims easier to process. We have one client who prepared a very good claim which would have meant a tax repayment of £30,000; after involving Fiscale, the claim was nearly doubled. There are other examples.

Option b) is generally preferable to the DIY approach, however we must reiterate that R&D Tax Credits is a very specialised area. It is unlike most other areas of accountancy and taxation in that it is less about tax and more about your R&D. The numbers is the easy bit, working out what is qualifying R&D and what constitutes a scientific or technological uncertainty are the challenging bits!

Most accountants are well aware of how to calculate R&D Tax Credits but are much less confident with deciding if the activities undertaken by the client are R&D.

The fact is, we work alongside many accountants because they realise that this is a niche area. Their clients can gain more benefit by using the services of specialist R&D Tax Credits advisors. We do not compete with accountants as we are not offering those standard accountancy services. All we do is R&D Tax Credits and Patent Box Relief.

One of the major differences between R&D Tax Credits submissions made by an accountant and a submission made by Fiscale often lies in the presentation of the information. Many Accountants will simply make changes to the tax computation, but not provide any information to HMRC, by way of explanation.