A product launch is always a fantastic opportunity for a company to celebrate their success, but we’d also like to celebrate your failures too! More on that later.
You might be celebrating further after reading this article because instead of following in the footsteps of a significant number of your peers and competitors, or indeed your own business in previous years, you’ve realized that your product launch also represents the point at which a significant failure arises, often without anyone really noticing, or even worse caring. This year you’re going to do something different, you’re going to pick up the phone and have a conversation about Research and Development Tax Credits with an expert.
A spin-off company from a restaurant chain, has done just that and is on the verge of submitting a claim for a repayable tax credit of £45k for their plant-based food product development.
It’s one of those, “unknown, unknown” moments that exist everywhere in business, but after being available for 22 years, Research and Development Tax Credits should no longer be one of them, but it is and alas, thousands of businesses continue to miss their right to claim this most generous of tax reliefs.
We are one of those experts, we’re only small, but we do have some substance behind our claims, we’ve been operating for 9 years now and have supported nearly 200 companies to claim more than £25m in R&D Tax Credits claims.
Let’s get back to your new product! It’s taken you nearly three years to get from concept to launch, along the way you’ve had Eureka moments and more abject failures than perhaps you would care to mention in polite company. You could claim Tax Relief on the bulk if not all of that three-year activity depending on the timing of your accounting year end.
If you aren’t quite ready to launch this year, but you and your team have been working thorough several ideas during the same time period and may be one or two of them are still going through the product development process, not having a finished product doesn’t prevent you from claiming now! In fact, you can claim for a completely failed project.
The good news is those failures are great news for your cashflow, they clearly weren’t at the time, but they are now. “Why” do I hear you ask? Well, normally your failure would go hand in hand with a scientific or technological challenge that you were trying to overcome. After all, we don’t set out to fail, it just seems to happen naturally!
We celebrate your failure as much, perhaps more than we celebrate your success. It sounds strange but we celebrate your failure because we know that failure while difficult in the short term, will open up the opportunity for you to claim Research and Development Tax Credits, whether you are paying tax or not. they can boost your cashflow.
The over-riding fundamentals for a successful claim for R&D Tax Relief are:
There has to be a project (developing a new/improved product)
There has to be an advance in science or technology (you probably aren’t going to launch a new product that is worse than what you already have, or than the market already has)
The advance has to be achieved by overcoming some form of scientific or technological challenge (the main way to overcome these is by learning and adapting through failure)
The solution to the challenge cannot be readily deducible by a competent professional operating in the field.
If you look back through your new product development, you’ll no doubt see it littered with failures and the one or two products that do make it to the point of launch didn’t get there by some fluke, they got there through overcoming every single technical or scientific challenge you were presented with.
Now you just have one final hurdle to get over, and that hurdle is of your own making, you just have to talk to an expert to confirm that you can claim. Go on, dare you, go to your browser, type in https://calendly.com/cooden/fandd, or if you are reading the online version click on the link. Book a Find Out in Fifteen Minutes discovery section with our Director, Simon Bulteel and start your next journey, we promise it will be worth it, just to know, for sure! Speak to you soon.
