Key factors
User needs
A centralized guided platform to submit required information for the R&D tax credit report.
Business needs
Increase the capacity to serve B2C customers by reducing time required for in-house tax experts.
Automate current manual tasks while maintaining compliance with industry-specific standards.
Infrastructure needs
Streamline publishing features for the B2B platform.
Getting started
To ensure users receive the correct forms in the appropriate format, we generate questions based on their company profile to establish the baseline of their tax study.
Identifying R&D activities
Next, users add specific projects and activities their company produced or performed. The platform identifies each entry for eligibility and includes the necessary documentation for the R&D tax credit study.
Adding wages
Next, we capture how much time each employee spent working on the activities.
Providing multiple methods to enter wages accommodates small and medium-sized businesses.
Importing expenses
After wages, businesses can claim eligible supply, computing, and subcontractor expenses as a part of their R&D tax credit.
Users need to enter a large number of expenses on the platform. To streamline this process, we partnered with Railz to import all historical transactions. Depending on the accounting service, we only display expense-related transactions that users can combine into a single expense per vendor.
Submitting for review
Once the required steps are complete, users submit their studies to be reviewed by the tax expert. We created a consolidated view of their information and links to jump back into specific sections that needed updates.
Ready to file
Emails are sent to users once their study has been reviewed and approved. After checkout, users can view and download their completed tax credit study.
Results
Over a $1 million dollars in total tax credits generated on the platform.
Successful transition Q4 2023 from manual to automated report generations.
Future improvements
While the initial launch of transactions made expenses more accurate, our ideal flow would automatically group transactions that shared the same vendor name and account. This approach hit a roadblock when we noticed a discrepancy in transaction types across accounting services.
To get our desired flow would require a layer of normalization on our end or bespoke mapping for each service to ensure we were calculating the correct net totals.
The team
Product Manager
Paul Lanyon, Zhach Pham
Engineers
Arniel Ceballos, Brian Lavall, Elias Mulhall, Jeff Cole, Priscila Trevino, Zelika Anchipolovskaya
Collaborating Designer
Jesse Hoyos