Reviewed by Logan Hanson, BSc, CPA. Last verified against CRA guidance on July 29, 2026.
You tag the work when it happens instead of reconstructing it at year-end. The disruption most companies associate with SR&ED comes from the same place: waiting until after the fiscal year closes, then pulling developers into weeks of interviews to reconstruct what they did months ago. Flip that around, capture the eligible work as it occurs and scope it with a few product owners, and the developer time required collapses.
The best documentation is a byproduct of the work, not a separate project bolted on at year-end.
Because you are rebuilding months of technical history from memory, and memory fades. By the time the year closes, people have moved teams, left the company, or simply forgotten the dead ends that made the work eligible in the first place. So the process costs a lot of developer time and still misses the most important technical challenges, the failed attempts and unresolved uncertainties that are exactly what SR&ED rewards.
It has two lightweight parts, neither of which pulls the whole engineering team into a room.
An enterprise software company with multiple product teams and about 30 developers had been starting its SR&ED process after year-end, then figuring out the eligible work, which cost weeks of calendar time and over a hundred hours of developer time. The real technical uncertainty lived deep in the platform’s architecture: managing extremely large, tightly interconnected datasets without performance failures, reconciling complex layers of historical change, and balancing speed against accuracy when generating derived outputs on demand. The after-the-fact approach kept missing those challenges as staff left or forgot.
We scoped the eligible work with a small group of product owners and set up an internal tagging system so technical work is flagged for SR&ED as it happens, backed by a quarterly capture of the key challenges. Developer interview time dropped to about 12 hours a year, total preparation fell by more than 100 hours, and the year-end process became straightforward. This is one of eleven engagements in our full SR&ED case studies document.
The efficiency has two payoffs. First, the direct one: cutting more than 100 hours of senior developer time returns real capacity to shipping product. At a fully loaded rate of $120 an hour, 100 hours is about $12,000 of engineering time handed back every year.
Second, and larger, is the claim itself. Consider a Canadian-controlled private corporation (CCPC) with $700,000 in eligible developer salaries and $50,000 to an arm’s-length Canadian contractor (counted at 80%, adding $40,000), for a base near $740,000. At the enhanced 35% refundable rate, that is roughly $259,000 in federal credit, before the prescribed-proxy overhead amount and provincial credits, which usually push the total higher. Capturing work in the moment protects that figure, because the uncertainties that make it defensible are recorded while they are fresh. For a CCPC the credit is refundable, paid as cash even with no tax owing, up to the enhanced ceiling on the first $6 million of expenditures, for up to $2.1 million per year, which phases out with taxable capital and is shared among associated corporations.
Use this to move from a year-end scramble to a repeatable process.
We set the process up for you: scoping with a few product owners, a tagging system that rides on the tools your team already uses, and a quarterly capture so nothing is reconstructed from memory. We work on a flat fee billed monthly, published openly and roughly half the lifetime cost of percentage-based firms. We are the only SR&ED provider we are aware of that publishes its pricing.
The work is backed by a 75% approval guarantee: if the CRA approves less than 75% of the filed claim, we waive our fees. If there is no eligible work in your year, you don’t pay. For more, see our guides on how to prevent missed SR&ED refunds and why companies miss refunds.
Documenting SR&ED across teams does not have to mean pulling developers into weeks of year-end interviews. Tag the work as it happens, capture the uncertainties quarterly, and scope with a few owners, and you get a stronger claim for a fraction of the disruption. A free consultation usually tells you within an hour how much time and refund your current process is leaving behind. For the bigger picture, see our State of SR&ED hub.
Tag the work as it happens instead of reconstructing it at year-end, and scope the claim with a small group of product owners rather than interviewing every developer. That keeps developer time to a minimum.
Far less than a year-end scramble. One enterprise team cut its developer interview time to about 12 hours a year and reduced total preparation by more than 100 hours by capturing work as it happened.
Because staff leave or forget, and the most important technical challenges get missed. Reconstructing months of work after the fact is slow, expensive, and less accurate than capturing it in the moment.
A lightweight internal habit of flagging technical work for SR&ED as it happens during the year, so the eligible work is already identified and evidenced when it is time to file.
Yes. It captures the real uncertainties while they are fresh, which makes the technical narrative more accurate and more defensible if the claim is reviewed.
We scope eligible work with a few product owners, set up tagging so technical work is flagged as it happens, and add a quarterly capture so the year-end process is quick, on a published flat fee.
This article is general information, not tax advice. Tax figures depend on your corporation type, province, and taxation year.
Do you have a SRED question? Planning for the future or perhaps you want to know how much your claim might be? Don’t worry, our CPA is always ready to answer any question. Get a SRED expert in your corner.
Have a question? We’d love to help. If you don’t have a SR&ED expert in your corner, doesn’t it make sense to have one?
