It covers things such as:

• Qualifying conditions
• Eligible costs
• Differences between the SME Scheme and RDEC
• How to treat R&D expenditure covered by a grant or a subsidy
• How despite Brexit, EU rules are still applied to the definition of an SME and the amount of repayable tax credits that can be paid

You can do it yourself

You can take the chance, you might get lucky, HMRC are stretched when it comes to reviewing R&D Tax Relief claims, you might get lucky for three or four years, but then HMRC might look at a claim, it looks slightly higher than what they have come to expect. They open an enquiry into your last claim, they ask you a number of questions about how you determined that the work you were undertaking represented a global advance in science or technology. The explanation you provide doesn’t quite convince them, they think that you are just improving your own knowledge and capability, they decide as a result to open an enquiry into all of the other claims you have filed for exactly the same reason, the £150,000 that you have claimed and spent over the last four years, suddenly needs to be repaid, you don’t have it!

Am I scaring you? It’s not completely unintentional, but it could happen. However, worse still is it could still happen even if you have employed an R&D Tax Relief Consultant. Not all companies purporting to be R&D Tax Credit Experts will continue to support you in the event of an enquiry, some will work on a fixed fee and then leave you to pick up the pieces or pay a lot more to them to support you with an enquiry. It’s not all of them, but there are some!

We won’t leave you in the lurch

Our “No Claim, No Fee” promise means that we don’t get paid if your claim is unsuccessful, it also means that we will defend your claim through an enquiry with HM Revenue and Customs, if that claim is retrospective and after you have received a refund, we will reduce our fee if the enquiry reduces the value of the claim. To date we have claimed around £20m for companies of all shapes and sizes, our largest claim has been over £1m our smallest about £2,000, in the 8 years the company has been operating our claims have been enquired into 6 times, we have defended them all successfully and more than 99% of the costs that we have claimed have been accepted. In fact our first ever piece of work was to help a company with an ongoing enquiry to successfully close it by examining the corporate structure and during the enquiry we noticed that the company hadn’t claimed for subcontractor costs in their claim, which enhanced it by a further £30,000.

If you work with the right Tax Consultant your risks are greatly reduced, it is absolutely not risk free, but the risks are shared, but the knowledge and expertise that you gain, may not only increase the value of your claims, but it may also give you additional piece of mind.

To start your R&D Tax Credit journey with an R&D expert, you can book a free, no obligation discovery call at 01424 225345.

The post Why do you need a R&D Tax Consultant? appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

If your company had a financial year end of 31 March 2024, and you haven’t claimed R&D Tax Relief before or you haven’t submitted a claim between 1^st October 2021 and 30^th September 2024, then you will need to notify HMRC of your intention to claim, by 30^th September 2024.

If you don’t your claim won’t be accepted. It’s also not a fixed deadline as it will be relevant for every month going forward so a 30th April 2024 year-end will need to pre-notify by 30th October 2024 and 31st December 2024 year-end by 30^th June 2025.

If you think you might be considering a claim, then you really need to make sure you have pre-notified HMRC by 30^th September if you are a company with a March year-end.

The rules are further complicated by disallowing a claim made on an amended tax return (a second filing) to include an R&D Claim that was submitted in the period between 1^st April 2023 and 30^th September 2024. So, if you filed an amended claim for 31^st March 2022 after 1^st April 2023 and you haven’t yet submitted your 31^st March 2023 claim or you submitted it after 1^st April 2024, you will need to pre-notify HMRC.

Confused? We were!

Whether they have complicated the rules to catch people out we don’t know, but they are complicated.

Not sure where to start? Well you can try here, but it doesn’t reference the disallowing of amended R&D Claims, so if you’re still not sure or if you don’t have access to your online tax account, why not send us an e-mail or give us a call and we can help you with that. You don’t even have to use us for your R&D claim.

We’ll have a quick chat about your projects, we’ll need a bit of information about the business, some dates and names and reference numbers and we’ll prepare and submit your notification form.

There’ll be a small fee! £350!

You may subsequently decide not to prepare a claim, or you might ask us to prepare a claim and in our more detailed look at your projects, we might say there isn’t scope for a claim as your projects don’t meet the requirements, or there isn’t sufficient cost to make it viable for either of us.

If you do go on to use our full R&D Tax Relief service, we’ll discount our final fee to remove the cost of the original notification.

That’s fair, isn’t it?

The post 30 September – Massive deadline for R&D Tax Relief Claimants appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

Are you now wondering what your SIC Code is? Or even asking what is a SIC code?

Well, it stands for Standard Industrial Classification, if you set your company up at Companies House it’s the little bit of information that you provided to Companies House which described what your business was going to do when it was established. If your business has changed over the last 15 or 20 years it may now not reflect your businesses activity.

Imagine you are Jeff Bezos, setting up Amazon for the first time and you were selling books from your garage, you might have used, 47910 – Retail sale via mail order houses or via internet, if he launched Amazon Web Services from the same company he might have used 63110 – Data processing, hosting and related activities , with Amazon Prime now focused on TV production and broadcasting then 59113 – Television programme production activities and 60200 – Television programming and broadcasting activities or 61200 – Wireless telecommunication activities might also be relevant.

So as your business evolves so should your SIC Code, these days 47910 doesn’t adequately reflect the activities of Amazon, so, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to ask them why they are claiming for £1m of R&D Tax Credits for a mail order book service!

It’s a Hot Topic for HMRC

In fact, it has become so hot that HMRC have two significant recent actions that focus on a company’s SIC Code:

Firstly, their new Additional Information Form that every company submitting an R&D Tax Credits claim after 8^th August 2023 is going to have to complete, asks for the company’s SIC Code, this means they can risk assess claims based on a SIC Code.

Secondly, they recently wrote to several thousand businesses telling them that whilst it isn’t impossible that the company could be undertaking Research and Development they “would not expect to normally receive valid R&D claims in the following business sectors” they went on to list: Care Homes; Childcare Providers; Personal Trainers; Wholesale Retailers; Hairdressers or Beauticians; Restaurants, pubs, bars and cafes; Real Estate Agents; and Educational institutions, which we would tend to agree with, but they went on to include: The service sectors, Textiles industries; the construction industry; and consultancy firms. Which are a little more surprising as certainly textiles and construction are areas where R&D could be happening, perhaps not with every company in these sectors, but certainly some, and the other two seem rather non-specific and catch all!

So, if you only take one thing away from this blog, it should be go and check your SIC code, if it isn’t completely representative of what your business does today, you can list at least four and maybe more at Companies House, so getting adding the most relevant.

If you’d like to know more why about R&D Tax Credits and how they can benefit your business, why not get in touch to arrange a discovery session with me.

The post Could your SIC Code land you in hot water with HMRC? appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

You have one year from the end of the accounting period to prepare and file your tax return, even though you have to pay any tax 9 months and a day after the year end, and something else most people don’t realise is that you then have up until the second anniversary of the year end to make any amendments to that return.

That means when you talk to us about your potential to claim for a project that you are undertaking today, in this financial year, if you have undertaken any similar projects in the two financial periods before this current one, then you could file some historic claims. The deadline is not flexible, it is a very hard deadline, so at the end of the day on the second anniversary of the end of your company’s accounting period the window slams shut.

A couple of examples

Let us assume that today is 1 November 2021. Your company has a December year end. That means  that you are currently in an accounting period for the year ended 31 December 2021, you need to file your tax return for the year ended 31 December 2020, by the end of the year and you also have until the end of the year to amend your tax return for the year ended 31 December 2019.

If you had £25,000 of eligible R&D spend in 2019 and £40,000 of eligible spend in 2020, you could get around £6,200 of tax relief in 2019 and around £9,900 of tax relief in 2020 if you were profitable. If you were loss making you could claim a repayable tax credit of around £8,300 in 2019 and £13,300 in 2020.

However, if your company has a September year end, you’ve just finished your 2021 accounting period and will shortly begin the task of preparing your accounts for 30 September 2021, and you are in the accounting period for 30 September 2022, that means you can still claim R&D Tax Relief for your 30 September 2020 year end by amending your tax return for that year and you could also claim for 30 September 2021 when you prepare your initial return, but you will have just missed the deadline for preparing a claim for 30 September 2019.

Morals have consequences

If there is a moral to this story, it is don’t put off talking to someone about R&D Tax Relief, the longer you delay the more money you are losing. Having a conversation with us about your potential to claim is absolutely free and without obligation, however some firms who cold call, will have their sales team ask some basic qualifying questions and will sign you up to claim before even having that slightly more in depth conversation. If you talk to us, you’ll be talking to an expert and we reckon in 15 minutes of talking to you about your company and the work it has been doing, we’ll have a pretty good idea whether it is worth pursuing a claim.

Book a call today and start that conversation, it could mean you don’t miss out on claiming £000’s back from HM Revenue and Customs.

The post How far back can I Claim R&D Tax Credits appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

You only have to see some of the recent announcements such as:

– Phasing out new Diesel and Petrol Cars by 2030

– Shell installing a network of 50,000 of accessible on-street and on forecourt EV charging points across the UK, through its recently acquired Ubitricity business.

– The Highways agency using Graphene in asphalt to enhance the durability of road surfaces and extending the periods of time between maintenance.

It’s the little things

We’ve been trying to work out how to make our tax consultancy more “Sustainable”, but its difficult, we work from a serviced office so have little impact on the choices of services. We come to work and travelled to our clients through a mixture of train and car, we could use cars less, but they are convenient, but we haven’t really been visiting clients since lockdown ceased. Instead, we have made use of services like Zoom and MS Teams to keep interacting with our customers, so perhaps in a way, we have stumbled into being slightly more sustainable.

We will continue this into the future and mix in a handful of client visits as we move forward. It’s difficult not being on a client’s premises, certainly when it comes to the engineering and manufacturing sectors that we support with Research and Development Tax Credit claims.

Being on site gives you a feel for what’s going on, especially if you have a curious nature, which we tend to have, because of what we do. When we ask questions based on what we see, hear and feel, generally speaking the potential to claim and also the value of the claim increases.

Sustainability doesn’t have to be expensive.  It doesn’t have to be huge grand gestures, it will be the sum of all of the little changes that we make in both our personal lives and in business that will be greater than the whole.

The bigger projects can get support

However, if you are looking for that one big project, that world beating new piece of technology, or an idea to revolutionise the agricultural industry or the renewables industry, or to reduce waste, then it might be expensive, it might be time consuming, but there are plenty of ways that you can find support from government.

There are a number of competitive grant schemes that have sustainable elements at their core, you only have to check out UK Research and Innovation  (www.ukri.org) where there are over 100 opportunities for business funding, granted not all of them are focused on sustainability but there will be a significant number.

Then there’s research and development tax relief. If you are lucky enough to have successfully received a grant, you may be somewhat surprised to hear that you could also benefit from tax relief for spending the grant money. You can claim under the RDEC scheme, whether you are a large company or an SME for the grant funded projects, which for money spent since 1 April 2020 will generate either a tax rebate or a cash injection of up to 10.53% of the eligible costs.

If you are a small company and you either didn’t apply for a grant or weren’t successful in your application, but have decided to go it alone regardless then you could in fact be in line for an even greater cash injection for a loss making company of up to 33.35% of your eligible spend, if you are profitable it will reduce your tax liability by up to 24.7% of the eligible spend.

The last way the government can help is through Patent Box. If your new product is so ground-breaking that you are looking to Patent it and are successful in being granted a patent, you could reduce your tax bill further, because of the profits being generated on the sale of the items being taxed at a reduced rate of 10%.

As we move towards the end of 2021 and in to 2022, we can help you with all of these aspects of funding for innovation, as we have grown our business relationships to include an innovation grants funding expert to our existing family of services, which already focus on R&D and Patent Box.

In the meantime, one of the things that we have already been doing is offering a reduction in our fees for companies that are developing green technology, sustainable agriculture and renewables. We’ve worked with a few companies this year and are looking to find and support more businesses that are working in these high value areas that will help all of us to be a little more sustainable in our lives.

If you would like to have a chat to determine whether you have an eligible project, sustainable or not then you can book a 15 minute call with our director, Simon Bulteel. Get in touch today.

The post Can you make innovation in sustainability financially viable in the short term? appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

There has also been a significant rise in the number of cold calls that businesses are receiving from sales teams at these new “experts”, promising thousands of pounds in cash for your business.

Sounds familiar, I hear you say! Well, that’s because it is. With the closure of the PPI claims industry, a number of people who set up claims’ management companies to make a fast buck, have turned their attention to R&D Tax Credits for the next fast buck.

They are treating the process like a claims’ management company would. Pile in a load of stuff in the funnel let some of it fall by the wayside and pick up the cream at the bottom. They are relying on the fact that HMRC doesn’t have the manpower to check every claim and that if most of them get through, they’ll do all right.

Is that the right way to approach things? Of course it’s not. The idea of R&D Tax Credits is to reward companies who are taking a significant financial risk in developing new, or improving their existing products, processes, materials, devices and software, not to throw a load of spurious brown matter, that might be mud, at a wall and see what sticks.

It is fair to say that the legislation is complicated and that many businesses don’t have the capability to understand it in its entirety, let alone apply it to their circumstances, so there is a place for a genuine expert to support a company to claim.

If you are told claiming is “risk free”, because you won’t pay us a penny until you get your money back, you’ve been told a mistruth, it is risk-free in terms of your liability to the company that prepared your claim, but your liability to HMRC could be significant, with interest levied on refunds that are subsequently clawed back and significant penalties for the most spurious of Tax Credit applications and smaller penalties possible for an incorrect claim.

We’ve been around for 8 years, I’ve been a qualified accountant since the turn of the Millennium, I was involved in my first claim in 2005 and have been preparing claims since then. For the next 8 years it was for my employers in Clinical Research and Motorsport Engineering. Our Lead technical report writer has a PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics and was a serial researcher at a number of prestigious Universities around the world, before working on the Fuel Systems at Airbus and then working in the IT industry before starting to write technical reports for a number of larger specialists.

Here’s our short checklist of things to do before engaging a R&D Tax Credits Expert

• Check out the business at Companies House to see how long it has been in existence
• Check out previous directorships for the directors of the business on Companies House
• Check out previous roles on Linked In for the owners and staff, is there an expert there?
• Find out what their definition of “Risk Free” is
• Do they have Professional Indemnity Insurance that covers you if they get it wrong?
• Ensure that you receive a copy of the technical report to read through to ensure that what they have written, reflects what you have done. That is in effect what you are paying them for and what HMRC will judge your claim on. If it’s full of lies and inaccuracies, don’t expect HMRC to be lenient because “they didn’t share it with us.”
• Be wary of someone who completely cuts your accountant out of the loop

Are we perfect? 99.5% of the time!

Oh and don’t get me started on the software to support accountants prepare their own claims. If you don’t know what qualifies for R&D Tax Credits how is a piece of software to help you prepare the claim going to help!

If you’d like a no nonsense, reduced risk approach for your R&D Tax Credits claims or an expert to support your clients, get in touch with us and book a 15 minute call.

The post The rise of the unscrupulous R&D Tax Credits expert appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

Tensei think it is ‘Smart to use what is wasted and not waste what is precious’.

This nugget of a company was founded by Annabelle Cox, previously co-founder of SCIN, the UK’s largest materials library and resource based in London, Clerkenwell.  Curiosity and Systemic Design has fuelled her relationship with business.  Early 2013 and on the back of an exhibition at SCIN showcasing materials development inspired by the farm, she realised that there was potentially an opportunity to create technical materials, notably papers, from straw.  Historically, straw has been used in Indo-China as a substitute for wood pulp. Adoption in the West though is another story and for good reason, there was plenty of forestry.

Fast forward to 2016 and change rides wildly into town as the perfect storm of shifting societal habits, resource constraint, climate change and plastic ‘non gratis’ colluded to Tensei’s benefit. We needed and need to look to pastures new and ironically, some answers lie in the field.

So why was this so interesting for Tensei? In a nutshell, Tensei researches, develops, and produces smart and or useful pulps, materials and products using biological systems, notably crop waste, biowaste and grasses.

This may sound simple and to an extent it is but the ‘to do’ list to make change happen for comfortable global adoption of these fibres is extensive: consistency, quality, supply, accreditation are some of the interesting headers.

Whilst Tensei are working hard to supply some of the answers, in part through a new technology platform to deliver on those requirements for adoption, they appreciate that for any innovation to succeed, it needs to work within current operating systems first before it can stretch its legs. Tensei’s approach therefore is to gently tickle Industry into making the change. For example, Tensei specifically work using commercially available pulps at this stage – wheat, bagasse, hemp, jute, bamboo, rice straw, cotton linters, flax but in the future, this will extend to a broader base of fibre from multiple bio waste streams.

To put it into greater context, the paper and board pulp market is currently about 431million tonnes of which non-wood is roughly 3% of the market – 12 million tonnes. ( source FAO)  Yet there is roughly 2.5 billion tonnes of uncollected straw estimated to be available.

A scalable, financially profitable business is of course important but the endemic spirit driving this is the need for the global economy to see the opportunity afforded by this raw material source. It is yet to become the ‘Go to’ material of choice but it waits quietly in the wings. Tensei is one of the drivers towards mainstream adoption of straw or crop waste as a viable, albeit different, resource for multiple industries from packaging to bio composites, textiles to chemicals.

Tensei is diaphanous:  part synthetic biology, part tech and full on environmental in its positioning as a company and ethos.

It sits between ‘Impactful’ and tech. Almost like a person yearning for mindfulness but with formula 1 elbow tweaking.  Like many emerging companies, Tensei is part of the global bioeconomy and according to Forbes:

“The global bioeconomy is about to take off as manufacturers choose biology as the method of choice to efficiently produce high-performance, sustainable products. Synthetic biology is at leading edge of this $4 trillion gold rush”

Part of Tensei’s offering is product based, this helps it to embark on its own R&D projects and demonstrate how it can also commercialise innovation for its customers. To date, Tensei has developed its own papers for food and drink: absorbent papers for uses ranging from pads in soft fruit punnets, bakery and in the future meat, fish and poultry, takeaways. and new recyclable coated laminate papers for a range of products from straws to crisp bags.

So, for those that want to future proof and deliver a genuinely impactful set of product solutions Tensei would love to help solve problems ranging from alternative solutions to plastic to what to do to valorise biowaste. The crop harvest is no longer just about food, it may even one day form part of a satellite construct orbiting earth. For more information on Tensei, visit www.tensei.co.uk.

Tensei have so far been able to claim around £30k for their historic R&D efforts and we are currently preparing claims for more, which will no doubt be used to fund future R&D that this innovative business, with an alternative idea, still has to undertake to widen their product portfolio.

Arrange a “Find Out in Fifteen” discovery session to determine your eligibility to claim. Book a call now!

The post Hello world – meet Tensei appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

Mmmm, well, that’s not really what’s happened over the last 15 months with Covid and all that we have endured as a nation, and to a certain extent as one humanity. When you throw the ongoing impacts of Brexit into the mix as well, I suppose there is some belief at least that the latter part of the headline might actually be true!

However, here in the UK things are beginning to look up. The vaccine roll out continues at pace, being in the 45-49 year old category, I’ve just booked my first jab, I think I may well have had it by the time you get round to reading this! We’re able to go and have a beverage in a pub garden, we can meet outside as either two households or six people and we can finally have our hair cut. The last time my barnet was trimmed was the start of November, just before lockdown 2! It’s a mess and it’s got a lot more grey in it.

And yet despite all of this in our private lives, for many in the food and drink industry your working lives may have changed a bit but the demand for products and services has been maintained, although for some of you, that may be in a slightly different format.

With change comes innovation, and in the UK and a few other countries around the world, with innovation comes tax relief. Now not all innovation is worthy of tax relief, but there are significant elements that do reach the criteria for tax relief.

Developing new products, processes, materials and devices, or significantly improving existing ones could all qualify. The bar requires that a competent professional operating in the field couldn’t have readily deduced the solution, or a group of people having a discussion couldn’t come up with it quickly. Ultimately if it required significant thinking time, then there is some scope to claiming.

It could be that during the pandemic, shortages existed in the supply chain and yet demand for your product continued. If you had to significantly adapt a recipe, by going beyond an established substitution of one product for another and you had to experiment to ensure that there were no discernible differences between the end products, and this required, research and batch trials, you could have a claim.

It’s not just in food and beverage production that there is scope to claim, it’s the development of machinery, processing equipment, cookers, dryers. How you grow the crops and develop new varietals that may be more hardy or resilient to pests, need less fertiliser or treatment during the year.

It can be a real pain trying to establish for yourself whether you think what you have done meets the criteria. There are pages and pages of notes on HMRC’s website, if you’ve never looked, if I’ve piqued your interest you can go to HMRC Internal Manuals or just search for “CIRD80000” in Google or Bing.

Or you could just be brave and say, I don’t need to know that level of detail for myself, I just want to talk to someone about our project or projects, that does know that level of detail because that’s what they do. Well, you’re in the right place, right now.

Get in touch today and book a “Find out in 15 minutes” discovery call with me, there’s no obligation, if you just want to find out if you might be able to claim and go and do it for yourself, be my guest. Good luck! Speak Soon!

The post What innovation or opportunities have arisen in your business? appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

As we have started the new year with encouraging news about vaccines and hopefully a more positive outlook on the year ahead than perhaps we might have had six months ago, when many business owners thoughts were more focused on survival, it’s important to refocus on those sustainability goals that many businesses have.

We’ve been trying to work out how to make our tax consultancy more “Sustainable”, but its difficult, we work from a serviced office so have little impact on the choices of services. We come to work and travelled to our clients through a mixture of train and car, we could use cars less, but they are convenient but haven’t done so since lockdown. Since the onset of the first lockdown we have made use of services like Zoom and MS Teams to keep interacting with our customers.

So perhaps in a way, we have stumbled into being slightly more sustainable, will we maintain this as we come out of the other side of Covid? Who knows? It’s difficult not being on a client’s premises, certainly when it comes to the engineering and manufacturing sectors that we support with Research and Development Tax Credit claims, being on site gives you a feel for what’s going on, especially if you have a curious nature which we tend to have, because of what we do. When we ask questions based on what we see, hear and feel, generally speaking the potential to claim increases.

Sustainability doesn’t have to be expensive, it doesn’t have to be huge grand gestures, it will be the sum of all of the little changes that we make in both our personal lives and in business that will be greater than the whole.

That being said, if in business you are looking for that one big project, that world beating new piece of technology, or an idea to revolutionise the agricultural industry or the renewables industry, or to reduce waste, then it might be expensive, it might be time consuming, but there are plenty of ways that you can find support from government.

Business funding opportunities

There are a number of competitive grant schemes that have these sustainable elements at the core, you only have to check out UK Research and Innovation  (www.ukri.org) where there are over 100 opportunities for business funding. Granted not all of them are focused on sustainability but there will be a significant number, particularly with the advent of the government’s Industrial Strategy and its continuing signals that in the new post-Brexit world, we won’t be left behind when it comes to research and innovation.

Then there’s research and development tax relief. If you are lucky enough to have successfully received a grant, you may be somewhat surprised to hear that you could also benefit from tax relief for spending the money that you have received from the grant. You can claim under the RDEC scheme, whether you are a large company or an SME for the grant-funded projects, which for money spent since 1 April 2020 will generate either a tax rebate of up to 10.53% of the eligible costs or in the event you are loss-making a cash injection of the same 10.53%, so in a way you are having your cake and eating it.

If you are a small company and you either didn’t apply for a grant or weren’t successful in your application, but have decided to go it alone regardless then you could in fact be in line for an even greater cash injection for a loss making company of up to 33.35% of your eligible spend, if you are profitable it will reduce your tax liability by up to 24.7% of the eligible spend.

The last way the government can help is through Patent Box. If your new product is so ground breaking that you are looking to Patent it and are successful in being granted a patent, you could reduce your tax bill further, as a result of the profits being generated on the sale of the items being taxed at a reduced rate of 10%.

How Cooden can help

As we move forward in 2021, our goal is to be able to help you with all of these aspects of funding for innovation, as we look to grow our business by incorporating a business grants element to our existing family of services, which already focus on R&D and Patent Box.

In the meantime, one of the things that we have been doing is offering a reduction in our fees for companies that are developing green technology, sustainable agriculture and renewables. We’ve worked with a few companies this year and are looking to find and support more businesses that are working in these high value areas that will help all of us to be a little more sustainable in our lives. If you would like to have a chat to determine whether you have an eligible project, sustainable or not then you can book a 15 minute call with our director, Simon Bulteel.

Ultimately it feels like a lot of us accidentally became more sustainable as a result of Covid, but in spite of this, it will be great to put 2020 behind us and make the most of our new discoveries and get back to making good on our original sustainability goals as we grow into 2021.

The post Did sustainability take a back seat to survival in 2020? appeared first on Cooden Tax Consulting.

A product launch is always a fantastic opportunity for a company to celebrate their success. However, this year it’s a bit different, you won’t be doing a hard launch on a stage at a fantastic business exhibition with 100s of your potential customers in front of you. You are going to have consider a soft launch using online and hope that the phone rings.

But this year you’ve read this article, and instead of following in the footsteps of a significant number of your peers and competitors, or indeed your own business last year, you’ve realised that your product launch also represents the point at which a significant failure arises often without anyone really noticing, or even worse caring.

This year you’re going to do something different, you’re going to pick up the phone and have a conversation about Research and Development Tax Credits with an expert.

You could be missing out on R&D Tax Credits

It’s one of those, “unknown, unknown” moments that exist everywhere in business, but after being around for 20 years Research and Development Tax Credits should no longer be one of them, but it is, despite a plethora of “experts” popping up all over the space, shouting about it to accountants and to businesses alike.

Alas, thousands of businesses continue to miss their right to claim this most generous of tax reliefs.

We are but one of those experts, but we do have some substance behind our claims, we’ve been operating for 7 years now (our birthday was 1^st September) and have supported nearly 200 companies to claim more than £16m in R&D Tax Credits claims.

But back to your new product, it’s taken you a while to get from concept to launch, along the way you’ve had Eureka moments and more abject failures than perhaps you would care to mention in polite company.

You and you’re team have no doubt had several more ideas during the same time period and may be one or two of them are still going through the product development process (despite everything Covid threw at you in 2020) and your hoping to launch it in 2021 to a live audience.

Well, the good news is those failures are great news for your cashflow, they clearly weren’t at the time, but they are now. “Why” do I hear you ask? Well, normally your failure would go hand in hand with a scientific or technological challenge that you were trying to overcome. After all, we don’t set out to fail, it just seems to happen naturally! Something that you thought would be straightforward, turned out to be a massive obstacle in your path to success.

Failure presents an R&D Tax Credit opportunity

We celebrate your failure as much, perhaps more than we celebrate your success. It sounds strange and we are in no way some sort of strange voyeur watching your business with a voodoo doll and giving it a prick every now and again just to see what happens.

We celebrate your failure because we know that the failure while difficult in the short term, will open up the opportunity for you to claim Research and Development Tax Credits, whether you are paying tax or not they can boost your cashflow.

The over-riding fundamentals for a claim for R&D Tax Relief are:

• There has to be a project (developing a new/improved product)
• There has to be an advance in science or technology (you probably aren’t going to launch a new product that is worse than what you already have, or than the market already has)
• The advance has to be achieved by overcoming some form of scientific or technological challenge (the only way to overcome these is by learning and adapting through failure)
• The solution to the challenge cannot be readily deducible by a competent professional operating in the field.

If you look back through your new product development, you’ll no doubt see it littered with failures and the one or two products that do make it to the point of launch didn’t get there by some fluke, they got there through overcoming every single technical or scientific challenge you were presented with.

Now you just have one final hurdle to get over, and that hurdle is of your own making, you just have to talk to an expert to confirm that you can claim.

Find out if you are eligible – fast

Book a Find Out in Fifteen Minutes discovery section with our Director, Simon Bulteel, and start your next journey, we promise it will be worth it, just to know, for sure! Get in touch with us, speak to you soon.

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