R&D Tax Claim Preparation
Written and reviewed by the R&D Tax Accountants editorial team. Last reviewed 8 August 2026.
This is the whole claim, from working out which scheme governs your accounting period to filing the forms in the order HMRC insists on. It is the service most companies come for, and the work divides fairly evenly between the numbers and the writing.
The relief itself is explained on the R&D tax credits guide. This page is about what we do and how the engagement runs.
What We Prepare and File
First the scheme. Periods beginning on or after 1 April 2024 fall under the merged R&D expenditure credit, or under Enhanced R&D Intensive Support where the company is a loss-making SME at 30% R&D intensity. Earlier periods stay on the old rules. Companies straddling the boundary get two claims computed differently, and we identify that at the start rather than discovering it in the computation.
Then the costing: staff time and the apportionment behind it, externally provided workers and subcontractors at the restricted rate, consumables, software, data and cloud computing, and the qualifying indirect activities that support the project. We build it so each figure can be traced back to a record, because that is what a compliance check asks for.
Then the technical narrative, written to the statutory test rather than to the product. Then the claim notification form where one is required, and the additional information form, which has to reach HMRC before the Company Tax Return.
Where Claims Get Awkward
Three situations account for most of the difficulty. Grant funding on the same project, which changes which scheme applies to which expenditure. Group structures, where the size test, connected party rules and the intensity ratio all interact. And contracted-out R&D for periods from 1 April 2024, where the right to claim moved to whoever decided on and planned the work, and the contracts almost never say.
The fourth is simpler and more common: the technical lead who did the work has left. Reconstructing an uncertainty from repository history and old tickets is possible, and it is slower, so it is worth telling us early rather than at the drafting stage.
How the Work Is Sequenced
We start with the deadlines, because they are the only part that cannot be fixed later. If notification was required for the period, that is established before anything else. Then a short call with whoever led the technical work, which is the part that cannot be delegated to a finance team.
The costing and the narrative are drafted together rather than in sequence, because the projects that carry the expenditure determine which projects have to be described on the form. You see the narrative before it is filed, and we do not file a description of your technology that your own engineers have not read.
Fees for Claim Preparation
The fee is agreed in writing before any work starts, once we have seen the accounting period, the scale of the R&D and whether a notification deadline is in play. Nothing is charged until you agree it.
If the first conversation establishes that the work does not meet the definition of R&D for tax purposes, we say so then and there is no charge for reaching that answer. That is a better outcome than an engagement followed by a claim that will not survive being read.