Like most businesses you probably have a thousand priorities all screaming for your attention. While SRED is rarely at the top of the list, it starts to percolate to the top around this time of year as June 30th is the filing deadline for companies with a December 31st year end (75% of corporations).
If like most, you didn’t get time to keep copious technical and financial documents, what’s the best way to quickly gather your supporting information together for you or your external SRED consultant to prepare the claim?
Technical – Software
You have to be able to show you identified a problem, you attempted to solve that problem, and you tested your proposed solution. The weaker your supporting docs, the more you or the claim preparer (and the CRA in the event of an audit) will need to rely on your memory / verbal input. Supporting docs could include:
- Notes or whiteboard screenshots from agile scrums
- Emails
- Commits / Logs from any software program you use: Trello, Jira, Github, etc.
Technical – Non-Software
Similar goal as on the software side, but now there is an opportunity for more tangible evidence.
- Emails that talk about technical issues and how you solved them
- Notebooks, photos, videos, etc
- Trial sheets
- Any test results from equipment
- Process parameter changes from equipment logs, etc.
- Drawings, design docs, technical specs, etc.
Financial
- Time sheets or rationale for a percentage based approach – this could be based on your calendars, based on minutes of meeting, or other evidence based methods to approximate your time
- Contracts and invoices and any grants
- All the nitty gritty needed to file the T661: business number, subcontractor’s business numbers, last years taxable income
At a minimum this is the sort of information you will need to be able to pull for you or your consultant to sift through to build up your SRED claim.
For those of you filing for the first time, the CRA is typically more lenient on first time claimants, and if you can put together a strong technical write up, you will likely get a friendly FTCAS (CRA meets you, greets you, and then leaves you with an automatically approved claim) vs an audit (CRA meets you, greets you, and churns through every detail). If you plan to file for SRED, start to gather this information now, so your in house claim preparer or external consultant has the time to file your claim properly.