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R&D tax credit filing
Your engineers already did the work. Now get paid for it.
Federal and state R&D claims, documented activity by activity and filed to survive review. Average client recovery: $340K.
- $340K Avg. Recovery
- Federal + State
- 2–3 Week Filing
What this entails
Most startups leave six figures unclaimed.
If your team builds, tests, and iterates — new features, new architecture, failed prototypes included — that payroll likely qualifies for R&D credits. Pre-revenue startups can even apply the federal credit against payroll tax, turning engineering salaries into cash back.
We interview your technical leads, map sprints and commits to the four-part test, calculate qualified research expenses across payroll, contractors, and infrastructure, and prepare the technical memorandum your claim stands on.
What’s included
- Qualification study & technical memoActivities mapped to the IRS four-part test.
- QRE calculation & payroll mappingWages, contractors, and cloud costs captured.
- Federal + state filingsIncluding payroll-tax offset election for startups.
- Audit-ready support fileContemporaneous documentation, organized per project.
Process
From first call to filed claim in three weeks.
Week 1
Technical discovery
Two short interviews with your engineering leads plus read-only access to your repo and sprint history. No timesheets required.
Week 2
Calculation & memo
We compute qualified expenses, draft the technical memorandum, and review the numbers with you line by line.
Week 3
File & defend
Federal and state claims filed, payroll offset elected where available — and we respond to any IRS question within 24 hours.
Questions
Credits, answered.
We’re pre-revenue. Can we still benefit?
Yes — eligible startups can apply up to $500K of the federal credit against payroll taxes each year. That turns a paper credit into actual cash back before you’re profitable.
What counts as qualifying research?
New or improved products, features, architectures, and processes — including failed experiments. If your engineers faced technical uncertainty and tested solutions, it likely qualifies. We verify this in discovery, free.
How much of my team’s time does this take?
About three hours total across two interviews. We pull the rest from your existing systems — repos, tickets, payroll — so your team stays in the codebase.
What if we’ve never filed before?
Most of our clients haven’t. You can generally claim open tax years retroactively — we’ll review your history and capture every year you’re entitled to.
Get started
$187M claimed for startups like yours.
Answer three questions and we’ll estimate your credit and reply within 4 hours.