Ask anyone who has been through a difficult SR&ED review what they would do differently, and the answer is almost always the same: keep better records during the year. The good news is that “better” does not mean “more.” It means capturing a handful of specific artifacts at the moment they naturally occur.

The six artifacts that matter

  1. A dated statement of the problem. When your team hits something standard practice can’t solve, write two sentences about why. This single habit, noting the uncertainty when you meet it, anchors the entire claim.
  2. Records of attempts, including failures. Test logs, benchmark results, failed prototypes, abandoned branches. Failure is not embarrassing in SR&ED; it is evidence of investigation.
  3. Versioned technical documents. Design docs that evolve show iteration. Keep the old versions: the diff between v1 and v4 tells the story of the investigation.
  4. Time association. Not necessarily timesheets, but some contemporaneous way to connect people to projects: sprint boards, allocation notes, calendar records. Labour is usually the largest expenditure, and unsupported labour is the first thing a reviewer discounts.
  5. Meeting notes at decision points. A few lines recording what was decided and why standard options were rejected.
  6. Contractor scopes. If contractors did eligible work, their invoices should describe the work: “consulting services” supports nothing.

Make capture free, not disciplined

Systems that rely on discipline fail by February. Systems that piggyback on tools your team already uses (issue trackers, commit messages, lab notebooks, sprint reviews) cost minutes and run all year. The trick is a light convention: tag the work connected to a technological uncertainty so it can be found later.

The payoff compounds

Good documentation does more than survive review. It shortens claim preparation (the evidence is already assembled), increases claim size (eligible work stops falling through the cracks of memory), and lowers review risk (the file reads as engineering, not reconstruction). Companies that build these habits typically find their second claim with us is both larger and easier than their first.

If you want an honest read on where your documentation stands today, that’s one of the four things we cover in the free assessment, no preparation required.