Discover the Perfect DR Receipt Format for Research and Development

Dr receipt format for Research and Development

foreign let's get going so thanks everyone for joining today I have apologies for the postponement from last week but here we are today another full stack r d tax webinar uh so this topic is one that I get a lot of questions on after I do on my country or people always ask what kind of Records do you need to keep to be able to claim indeed is it required what are those requirements and what sort of what sort of best practice can we keep to make sure that claiming is very easy and straightforward we've put together the presentation today to go through all those questions tomorrow so as always this is not specific tax advice a lot of the content in today's presentation is has been taken from the ATO website in the Aussie industry website so it is very kind of General in nature but if you have any more specific questions then obviously we can provide a specific answers answers on our engagement that's me Jack Dean I'm the only tax manager here at full stack over 10 years experience assisting companies with r d tax claims and is the company so we're a child in accounting firm specializing in Tech communal startups in particular so we know very well what the kind of pain points are around some of the issues that we're going to discuss today and how we can assist clients in those areas so just a little bit of housekeeping that you probably noticed that the webinar is being recorded and so we'll provide the slides and reporting that will be after please use the Q a rather than the chat for questions it's just a bit easy to keep track feel free to ask questions throughout the presentation if they're relevant then I will get to them possibly as I'm talking but certainly at the end and so the agenda I'm just going to do a very quick eligibility recap of the r d taxing Center and then the bulk will be focused on the kind of record keeping and documentation aspect so why we need to do it are the various the compliance process and the various risks involved compliance risks involved are the types of evidence that you should be keeping and finishing off with just some record keeping principles that you can take away and hopefully apply to your r d claims tax Basics and eligibility so I'm just really going to race through these there is quite a lot of content in these slides but we've just included for your reference afterwards we're not going to go into any particular detail so Rd tax is very useful tool for startups to be able to stretch their development further and commercialize sooner so primarily I when I'm doing these print presentations I primarily talk about the refundable 43.5 tax offset for smaller companies companies under 20 million dollars in aggregated turnover you can get there's very little fairly substantial 43.5 refund cash refunds of your own expenditure the everything kind of revolves around what we call Core only activities and so that's really what we're looking for when we're making these claims the definition of acquiry activity is different to how people see r d in a more business or commercial context and it really focuses or focuses on technical Innovation technological innovation rather than attempting to resolve kind of business or commercial uncertainties like core only activity is an experimental activity that is conducted in the area of an established science it follows a systematic creation of work so that's where we talk about having a hypothesis carrying out logic steps or carrying out an experimental service and leading to logical results and conclusions the purpose of the activity must be to generate new knowledge and these core activities the outcome of the activity must not be able to be known or determinated Advanced sort of basis or technology information or experience and there are some other requirements so we're talking about Australian based activities so there is a location test it is people physically located in Australia at the time that those are India activities have been conducted you must spend at least twenty thousand dollars per year to be able to claim you can only claim activities conducted for you being reclaiming entity so if you're doing things under a subcontract for someone else and they will be the claimant rather yourself you need a company generally and you ultimately have to bear the Financial Risk so being paying for those activities not being reimbursed so types of expenditure contractors selling wages are generally the most substantial areas of expenditure you can also claim to claim value contract costal research service providers are also potentially events like grain electricity and premises then you are working in also obviously supplies and materials that are purchased for use in the r d activities uh payments to associate so that's you must you can only claim payments to Associates or amounts in Coachella Associates in the year that they were paid so be sure to pay your co-founders and things like that there are also some excluded quality activities this is not the full list this is just the selection that's most relevant to the kind of audience that I generally talk to so there's a few that I'm not going to go into but they're correctly or future reference so a really important part of claiming owners clashing your classifying your RNA activities so you can have projects with multiple core activities multiple supporting activities generally you don't want to be too high and just claim everything you really need to break it down and apply either definition core and supporting activities to each kind of area of work that you're doing um so why do we keep why what is the need to keep documentation for the purposes of r d attacks this is a bit of background the actual claiming process is retrospective generally so you conduct your activity for the year and then after the end of the financial you fill out an application form that is lodged you receive a registration number um that says you have registered these activities that are in your application form and then if you use that registration number in your in the Rd Tech schedule which is a part of the company tax return you will in most cases if you follow that process your activities will be registered and your your claim will be processed so you receive a refund or adjustment to the tax position now because it is a self-assessment process initially uh that does not mean that you're actually or that your activities are eligible or the expenditures are eligible it just means that you've submitted the forms before the before the Watchman dates and you're a company and things like that so you're able to claim so even getting that refund is not necessarily an approval from the government that you are doing eligible ID uh it means that your activities are registered and therefore you can claim those as part of your property tax return so any audit or review activity will generally come at maybe two three four five years after you've made a claim and if that that's the point General that's the point where you will have to provide additional evidence to substantiate your claims so the application form is you don't provide any Source documentation at that point it's just a kind of a narrative summary of what you have done in the year and what you plan to do similarly the tax schedule does not contain invoices and contracts and things like that it just contains some high-level figures relating to various cost categories any of that compliance activity will generally come as I said potentially years after you made a decline it's also worth noting that there is no Safe Harbor under the r d tax incentive for using a tax agent or an ID tax consultant for some other areas like submission of a company tax return you can rely on a tax agent in in certain claims that you've made debt and if something goes wrongly then you can say I've relied on them so I can get the Safe Harbor and that may reduce penalties and things like that no such thing exists for the ird tax and soon so really important to make sure that your claims are correct and that you keep evidence to substantiate those claims if required so I've touched on some of these why is it good to keep good documentation obviously it will reduce those compliance costs so in the short and long term so if you are a bit more prospective in your approach rather being retrospective than the year on year claiming process it's generally easier and quicker uh also in the long term if your claim is denied then obviously you will have to pay back this you might have to pay back those funds those future on those long-term compliance costs can be reduced by keeping Good Records on the ATO and other industry they have an attitude that if something is if you can't provide evidence of doing something then it didn't happen right so if they say explain to us how you determine the outcome was unknown or could not be determined in advance and you say we can't then that's when they're going to find again and potentially make you repay those funds doing a bit of work on the way through can actually increase the claim value because it means that you can be more sure of your clients if you for example if you keep more granular timesheets that show the actual cost of those or the actual timing turn on those activities then maybe you can be in order to be more aggressive in your approach but you can claim the actual correct amount rather than saying we didn't keep those records maybe let's just leave it let's not include that person because we actually don't know how we actually don't know how much time they spend on R D activities for the year then obviously can assist with the forecasting and trying to access other opportunities like currently clients things like that as well if you keep those good real-time records it also mitigates key person and keep contractor risk kind of looking back to that first that first point there if you are relying on a contractor to provide information and they're no longer there or the relationship broke down or something like that then obviously there is a risk there in being able to substantiate your claims a little bit about the process so just mostly focusing on Aussie industry for this in in the specifics here the ATO has a similar process but I find that the technical record keeping is generally there's more scope for him in there's more room for improvement available so those industry approach when you get when they get submissions or when they're doing compliance initial compliance activities then they will have a look at your form uh and then on the basis of the information in there the quality of the material then they will put you into one of three categories the green one there is where most people go in terms of it seems like they're claiming correctly and I was industry has can see that they are claiming correctly there's really no kind of Next Step there the middle the yellow there is trying to get it right so people that are trying to do the right thing but need a little bit of help so that they had tailored guidance of those kinds of companies and then the red up there is the one the companies the few companies that uh that have claimed or are claiming and are not eligible and then so obviously they're the ones that are going to be targeted generally the size of the claim as well has some impact on the kind of compliance activities so very small claims are less likely everything else being equal to get compliance activity compared to someone spending 10 million 100 million dollars a year on R D's industry user Journey so there's a few just examples of guidance there there may be so generally you are you will receive a red registration number and then compliance activity will come after in some circumstances they may do a pre-registration check and say Hey you know you've identified this issue we suggest you fix it and maybe you amend or re-lodge or perhaps okay we're going to let you slide this year because it's your first year but here are some here are some tips for improving the claim next year oh just got a question that has come in and I will address that towards the end so thank you for that please pop in those questions I am seeing them but I'll not necessarily address them in real time so the Aussie industry examination process you generally have 30 days to respond to these you can before the 30 days are up request for a 14 days extension generally you want to always create your own eyes and see you want to provide the information before the before the deadline date or ask for extension before that comes it's just good to manage that current relationship and not ignore him as that's the worst thing you can do is just ignore and hope it goes well so I was interested Oz industry can make findings based on the information provided and there is a process there where you may be able to provide further information so I just wanted to talk a little bit about the compliance cycle quickly this goes in a clockwise Direction here this graphic what you find is compliance is very cyclical so at some stages there will be a lot of compliance and the compliance activity going on and some stages there won't be much so generally the compliance activity starts to increase when the cost of the claim increases so if there are positive program changes like the introduction of the refundable component a lot of people will start claiming consultants and accounts and Industry groups and things people out there will be sprigging their services which there's arguments about whether you should do that or not things like there's never been better claim or it's really easy to claim and those kinds of things so everyone starts to claim maybe there's a lot more claims that are not correct going through program costs increase and then someone from the government says hey we need to save your money what's going on here a few high profile cases in the media and so there is a negative program change they start doing a lot of audits and reviews and then the of media narrative thing goes to or they're targeting this r d which is great for Australia and it should be supported so then it goes back the government goes oh okay we should be supporting this so they're making positive program change in the cycle starts again at the moment I think we're probably I haven't seen a lot of people out there saying Finance have been easy to claim again particular in software and areas like and the sum of the negative program changes that were proposed by the previous government were not successful in going through so at the moment it is at the moment there's not a lot of compliance activity going on converted to in the past so what is a successful plan I see a lot of people out there saying a successful claim is receiving a refund and obviously that's great but I think that kind of is misunderstanding process right so if you do those things that I said at the start if you submit an application form if you submit a schedule you will receive it that doesn't mean you're ireligible so how I like to look at success is initially obviously receiving a refund that's great but then what are your chances of receiving a review or audit up until the five years that the government can take a look at how we've mitigating those risks and then on top of that is if I do get reviewed what How likely will it be if that I can navigate that process or my clients can navigate that process without having to repay funds or without that being a real headache and a house so looking at r d much more holistically and not just saying okay our initial initial thing is getting that refund obviously that's important but there are is our tailing obligations as well and so there's a mix of different risks that we try and mitigate so compliance risk so not being compliant in the first instance with good scoping making sure that we know whether we're doing r d or not those kinds of things the documentation risk what kind of records are we keeping can we make that initial claim based on the documentation available and then support that if needed and then reducing the chances of being reviewed or audited through primarily the quality of information in the application form so are you actually addressing the questions are you is the information in there understandable to someone that might not have a technical background in that particular area so make you know making sure that that kind of narrative summary of what you've done here uh is easy to understand but still meets all the requirements so what kinds of evidence should you keep and potentially provide in the in the event of an audio review so there are two quite separate kinds of evidence there are the technical kind of documentation and the financial documentation as well that's something to keep in mind there are at this stage there are two separate order slash review processes there's a technical assignment there's the financial side I believe the government is currently looking at how they can be more aligned but at the moment is very one or the other or potentially both so this so the these next four or five slides are quite wordy it's just a list of examples of documentation that you can keep this is based on the Aussie industry guide to interpretation and the software guide in your software guide so I'm not going to go through all these in detail but I've included these as a reference for everyone there are various areas where you might need to provide evidence at a technical level how did you determine that the outcome of the activity could not have been known or determined about so that can be quite tricky three four five years after you've made a claim because the state of the art at that point is probably great because is not the same as when you started so how you how do you prove a negative about a set of facts that you know may have existed three four five years ago keeping state of the art searches is key like conducting a state-of-the-art searches and keeping those so they could be screenshots of Google searches and things like that that is one of the first things that an assassin might do is they might type name or some keywords from your technology into a search engine and see what comes up if there's 100 different products that look the same as yours it might be difficult to to be able to convince someone that at this time foreign other things like internal memos meeting minutes things like that are also potentially useful in this area even just things that are specifically created for the purpose of claiming or not claiming r d necessarily but being able to provide the evidence for Learning and generally it's better to do that before in a forward-looking manner rather than a retrospective now so the second area would be demonstrating that you conducted a systematic regression work that is based on principles of cyber science so these are the actual tests that the actual experiments that you've conducted evidence of your hypotheses that you're conducting activities in a systematic manner not just trial and error throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuff but you do actually have a plan that you're working on sort of some kind of scientific area and yeah you conduct those in a systematic manner um so that's probably more technical than that previous category it's about what you actually have done or plan to do and then I knew knowledge that the activities were conducted for the purpose of generating new knowledge so that test is based on purpose so at the time an activity was conducted what was the purpose was it to generate new knowledge and do r d or was it for a commercial purpose was it to produce produce a product that you then go on to sell it's generally easier to determine but for some activities where there might be a dual purpose and you need to demonstrate that there was a substantial purpose to generate new knowledge there I mean it's board meeting emails project plans things like that and we'll generally or maybe used to show supporting only activities that's more a purpose test as well so where an activity a supporting activity May support uh core only activity but also production activity then demonstrating that the main purpose to was to support the r d activity is very important and so there's an example there with development of a UI a GUI where customers and people are starting to interact with that you may have to to demonstrate that okay we there is a multiple purpose here but we're only claiming the part that was required for r d and having some kind of technical documentation or again a minute or a meeting notes or something like that to support that would be useful on the expenditure side so like I said quite different obviously you need to keep the work papers or have access to the work papers potentially done by a consultant or accountant timesheets is very or some kind of time allocation record is crucial there also contracts invoices things like that that are detailed enough or specific enough to show okay this is an r d cost or if something is r d you may have a contractor that does Rd and an ird work for you then having a sufficiently detailed invoice to make that calculation between those two areas of activity is useful also keeping documents to show all those white papers to show how your portioned overheads and things like that to the r d so on what basis did you take or was it based on a floor space was it based on Force Base an RD area compared to a non-india area or was it based on the time that someone's spent working on inverse not only things like that also contracts and IP agreements that confirm that activities were done for you is very important but running out of time here so this is just the last section just on record keeping principal collected some had a bit of a think about some things that you might like to take away from today so this is a really big catch rate for me so evidence not explanation that's really key the worst thing you what you don't want to do is under audit or review is try and explain your way out of something retrospectively if Aussie industry says provide evidence that this activity was conducted for the purpose of new knowledge provide evidence that the activity was conducted for the purpose of generating New York don't try and explain your way out of it don't try and scramble explain your way out of it so say okay here's some meeting minutes from here's some meeting minutes so that's specified okay new knowledge blah blah you can reference that back to the application form to the registered activities that's kind of an overarching category there uh so some other principles I have an r d Champion so this maybe goes against the kind of key man the key person recently I spoke about before but generally the clients that are most successful in making these claims efficiently and having the records have someone driving the process getting the buy-in from the other staff as well is really important there might be an extra thing that they have to do that isn't part of their ordinary activity so you need to let them know why it's important and that you can even have a direct implication for that but if you don't do this and we fail a claim then we'll have to pay back the r d refund and then we won't have any more money to continue paying your wage keep timesheets or something like that excuse me also identifying any weaknesses in your current systems and developing strategies to fix them very straightforward so aligning internal processes to r d and generally Advocate do creating new systems and things like that to substantiate these r d claims it's about making small changes to things that you're already doing to ensure that those compliance risks that we've spoke about have been reduced it's not doing a heap of extra work it's just doing a little bit of extra work in key areas to be able to substantiate those big part of that is keeping records uh contemporaneously or generating records contemporaneously that's something that's through a lot of the literature from the ATM when I was industry so records created at the time activities were conducted at all before in terms of post planning stages that's very important using the internal language of the pro or using the language of the programming into our documents so adopting things like hypotheses and things like that as well can be very useful and then also conducting regular r d meetings or using r d to existing meetings these kinds of things as well you may be able to claim them if you have an r d meeting that's discussing the progress of the ID that also happens to assist you in Rd compliance if the purpose is to support ird in terms of actually conducting those activities if you record that time then you get more employees are sitting around the table talking about it then well you may be able to claim them as well so there are ways to kind of absorb this cost in terms of increasing your the size of your plan and just the third and final one here is just aligning and Technical and financial records I often see a company or companies where they are keeping some time tracking but it might be at a project level rather than a at an activity level that might be right if the whole project is eligible but there are often parts of that project that might not be eligible so therefore they should be excluded how do you do that efficiently and quickly and correctly for this compliance process having more detail on invoices and contracts and things like that can also facilitate easier and more accurate calculations you know in that example if I'm a contractor and I'm doing R D and non-r D activities having that breakdown of an invoice is obviously it's very important so you can calculate the actual cost of those activities the ATO is not interested in you being conservative very interested in that you have taken reasonable care to calculate the actual cost of those activities so just saying oh we just took a conservative estimate doesn't really fly so keep that in mind so that brings us to the end of the presentation this is just a bit of an overview about all the services we provide so obviously the r d tax and the grants aside more General accounting for keeping tax planning like I said at the start we're really focused on Tech entrepreneurial startups we're very well placed to provide those kinds of services that brings us to we've gone a little bit over so if anyone has any questions please feel free to put those in the chat now thank you everyone for joining and apologies again for the postponement but hopefully you got something out of that hopefully you learned something and look out for this presentation as I said we will uh send out the slides for your reference my video so you'll be able to have a look at that and my contact details are also on the next page you can feel free to email any further questions through if you want to talk about your specific specifics then you can set up a meeting as well so we have links to all our characters there q a so Cameron is there any guidance on how granular the current supporting activity should be EG kind of six month project be a core activity and is a guidance on what what would need to be broken down further yeah so there is a lot of guidance around what is core supporting activity and how to how to design how to break those down register them ingly um so it wasn't the focus obviously of today but yeah so there is a lot of guidance I like to look at so core activities are all about having a hypothesis so it depends how many hypotheses you have a lot of companies just have the kind of one or they might bundle activities together and have a more overarching hypothesis that's a bit more project objective although you don't necessarily want to do that and then have a bunch of sub hypotheses because obviously these are iterative processes that have multiple hypotheses over a period of time so you can group those yeah it just really depends on the particular uh case and the particular claim besides the claim is all may come into it so yeah the kind of six month project be a poor activity yeah so yeah there's there are there is a best practice approach there so I think it's really just supplying the definition of the core activity on different kind of activities that you're doing different tasks that you're doing and then coming up with a strategy to ensure that you meet all those compliance obligations but not um spend too much time that you're spending weeks on the r d claim if it's only very small so I'm not sure that hopefully that kind of answered your question and then myself to the principals described apply to fmcg manufacturing companies as well sorry I'm just not 100 sure of till my head fmcg fast-moving consumer good principles I think the principles apply quite broadly I think yeah so it's about it's about initially defining what your activities are and then keeping appropriate records to be able to support those claims yeah to be honest sorry Marcel I'm not super familiar with um with vast moving consumer goods yeah you can obviously have r d to develop those goods and I guess the principles are common whether it's software or med tech or fintech anything it's just you know defining what their activities are running the lens of what require any activity is and then saying okay we have our call we have our supporting activities are we or can we do we have the information to make that initial claim and then if required do we have further information to substantiate those claims there are templates so we have internal templates that if we're engaged with companies then we're obviously happy to provide there are other templates that you can probably grab off the internet around state of the art search templates project plans time sheets things like that obviously but yeah and any taxants on R D tax and so on I think would have templates that they would provide to their clients and yeah so there are generic templates but also ones that once we kind of start getting in the process that might become a bit more tailored over over time yeah DJ a different type of toothpaste yeah so you'll just have to Define what your activities are we're developing a new toothpaste that has these properties that are better than what sort of market now we established the state of the Arts we'll do that we we're generating knowledge so it's all the same kind of thing so I think I'm just getting a message from thank you everyone hopefully that answered all the questions let me just check so if there's we've gone a little bit over just with those questions as we always do I'm happy to continue if anyone has any other questions otherwise I'll just leave it for probably another 30 seconds and the webinar thanks again to everyone who attended today hopefully by contact details we will email you the slides with the contact details they are so team at fullsack.com that's obviously just the generic one EPM out there then I'll put well the team will put you in touch with me and then yeah I'll always have to have a chat about your particular scenario and answer any questions there and potentially work together it doesn't look like there's any more questions coming through so thanks again keep on the lookout as well I thought we this is a regular series that we do on our own D so if there are any other topics as well that you'd like to hear about please feel free to shoot through an email um so we're always on the lookout for new ideas so thank you everyone and I think we will call it there which is [Music]