Basic qualifying requirements for your business include being a limited company and conducting eligible Research and Development activity. Your business can operate in any industry and be any size. It can be profit or loss making, in fact a loss-making business can often claim a higher rate of relief. 

What's really important is whether or not you have conducted qualifying R&D activity. Most SMEs won't qualify and we pride ourselves on providing you honest, expert advise.

If you don't qualify we'll up-skill you on the scheme and help you to potentially get access in the future.

If you do qualify, we can help you to prepare and submit a robust claim. 

Booking a free consultation meeting with us is the simplest method to find out if you qualify. 

Book your Free Consultation

At Acute Business Advisory, we do not tie our clients into contracts. Instead, we work extremely hard to provide market-leading, exceptional service to our clients. We offer our clients a proactive and consultative approach throughout the year to ensure we can offer our expert guidance in order for you to make the most of the scheme and ensure we prepare a robust claim.

If it’s possible, we relish the opportunity to visit our clients and really get to know your business.  

In contrast to many other advisory firms, you will receive the money directly into your account. This has recently been made a mandatory requirement by HMRC. Depending on your tax position this could be received as a refund of your corporation tax bill, a cash refund or relief on a future tax bill. 

HMRC advises that they aim to process claims for payment or to apply the relief within 41 days

The average claim made by SMEs in the UK is £60,104 (2021-22). 

What you can receive is dependent on the amount of time and money spent on your Research and Development projects and your tax position at the time of claiming.  

R&D Tax Relief is a complicated scheme. It has lots of nuances and edge cases. For this reason, it’s easy to claim for less than your full entitlement by excluding eligible costs.   

Our specialists will isolate all valid R&D expenditures and explain them engagingly and accurately in a comprehensive technical report, addressing the crucial questions in your additional information form. 

Qualifying expenditure includes the following costs which can be included in your R&D claim:

• Staffing costs
• Subcontracted R&D
• Externally Provided Workers (EPWs)
• Consumables
• Software
• Payments to the subjects of clinical trials

Firstly, book a free consultation meeting with your dedicated Business Development Manager. Following the success of the meeting, you will then need to send across your accounts, CT600, and tax consumptions.  

Next, you will need to attend a few meetings to discuss your R&D claim in more detail. This can range from one meeting online to a fair few face to face, it all depends on the size of your claim and also how you'd like to engage with us. 

Once we have written up your projects in detail, establish your tax position and how you can receive the relief, we will submit the claim and provide you with your revised tax documents. 

Last but not least, you will receive your R&D pay-out, which as explained, can vary but is usually between 4 – 6 weeks from the date of submission.

Following an initial consultation to establish your eligibility with one of our business development managers, we would need your accounts, CT600, and tax computations. 

Book a consultation meeting

As a loss-making company, your R&D credit is calculated from the combination of your enhanced R&D expenditure and your trading loss, with the same 14.5% rate applied. For that reason, the greater your loss, the more R&D credit you will be due as a % of your R&D expenditure. 

You have two years from the end of the accounting period to which the R&D expenditure relates to make a claim.

Effectively we can look retrospectively and if you conducted qualifying activity in those periods we can look at making two initial claims.