Debbie Hales from Asbestos First Ltd, talked to us about her experience in claiming Research & Development (R&D) Tax Credits from HMRC with our help. Here’s Debbie’s story….
“As a business we’ve recently transferred our accounting services to Friend & Grant and within 3 months of engaging with them they had helped me secure £13,000 in corporate tax savings by making a Research & Development tax credits claim.”
“My previous accountant had not mentioned anything about R&D tax credits and so we’d lost out on thousands of pounds! How I wish I’d known about this brilliant tax scheme years ago as we’re been developing innovative solutions in our business for years.”
“Mark talked about R&D at one of our very first meetings. He explained what they were and how they worked.”
“Whilst I knew it would be a little extra work to get the numbers together I knew that it would be worth it, so we jumped in.”
“First of all Slava came to see me, so I could show and explain to him what we do. He asked lots of questions so that he really understood our work.”
“We’d recognised that off the shelf ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) technology for the hazardous waste management industry wasn’t up to scratch. The legacy software couldn’t cope with planning, tracking and processing customer interactions neither could it be integrated into the regulatory bodies’ systems. So we had to design our own bespoke software to solve the problem.”
“Part of the development involved taking an off-the-shelf framework application that was capable of processing the datasets and developing this further to allow the integration into the wider systems architecture.”
“We’ve also developed a responsive interface for the ERP software making sure the compatibility of data between the old software and the new systems and allowing this to be synchronised with regulatory bodies systems. We were even able to claim for part of the project that had failed to deliver a result.”
“This was challenging. Extensive testing showed very promising progress in tackling these technological uncertainties and the development work continues.”
“Slava said to leave everything to him and a week later I received the project outline from him. He prepared the claim which was accepted by HMRC and a few weeks later we received a corporation tax saving of £13,000 for the year to 2017.”
“As the development work continues we’ll be submitting a further claim to cover this year’s R&D work.”
Debbie said “This is a great initiative by HMRC to help smaller businesses invest in essential R&D. Our development was essential, but knowing that the R&D scheme is available it will help us to pursue new R&D with more confidence.”
If you’ve had to work to solve a problem in your company then talk to your client manager or give Friend & Grant a call on (01634) 731390 and we’ll see if we can help you too. For anything to do with asbestos and preferably nothing else contact Debbie Hales. www.asbestos.ltd