SR&ED Technical Reports

SR&ED technical reports backed my clear financials and solid evidence are crucial to a successful claim. If you’re planning to file a SR&ED claim, you’ll need to deliver a technical report to the CRA. The CRA will then carefully read and assess the report as part of CRA review process. It’s essential to ensure that you provide them with a detailed technical report in addition to expenditures.

Submitting your report is the most vital step in the claim filing process. It’s well worth your time to verify that you’ve completed it properly. Your technical report must respond to the following three criteria:

1. List the technological or scientific uncertainties did you attempted to overcome.
2. What type of work did you perform during the tax year to overcome the scientific or technological uncertainties referred to in line 242?
3. What technological or scientific advancements did you achieve or attempt to achieve as a result of the work referred to in line 244?

These three questions only begin to cover the information that must be included in your technical report. It’s alsmo important, if you want a successful SR&ED claim, to make things easy for the CRA. Ensure that that your technical diary is linked to all of your supporting evidence. Make sure that evidence and associated financials are organized and above all easy to find and share should the need arise.

While you’re preparing your technical report, it’s important to remember that technical evidence that strongly supports the report should have been gathered all year long. Evidence is vital to the claim preparation process, which means it’s crucial to have supplemental documentation to reinforce your assertions.

DOCUMENTATION

To ensure that your documentation is compelling enough, confirm that it contains the following elements:

1. Today’s date. Including the date prevents any confusion regarding when your document was written.
2. The writer’s name. This ensures that CRA can trace the document back to the right individual. Once CRA knows who wrote the document, they can interview that individual during the audit process.
3. A variety of documents that represent all stages of the claim filing process. It isn’t sufficient to only include project planning documents or a list of experiments conducted. The more varied your documents are, the easier it will be for CRA to understand each aspect of the process, from the type of work you conducted to the advancements you made while your team pushed the project forward through testing, analysis and further hypotheses.

Each of these elements is crucial to the overall success of your technical report. Be sure to keep in mind that it isn’t sufficient to simply write up the report and submit it. The CRA expects you to follow a certain set of regulations so that they can review your documentation without any difficulties.

From verifying that your report adheres to the eligibility criteria to including all the relevant details in your supplemental evidence, each of these steps is worth paying attention to. Ultimately, taking these guidelines seriously will enable you to get the most out of the SR&ED claim filing process.

Read More