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I've heard vague tales of Canadian companies receiving tax incentives to do research, in the form of SR&ED credits. (http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/txcrdt/sred-rsde/m

I've heard vague tales of Canadian companies receiving tax incentives to do research, in the form of SR&ED credits. (http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/txcrdt/sred-rsde/menu-eng.html http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/txcrdt/sred-rsde/menu-eng.html) Does anyone have any concrete experience with the program?

Coincoin 11y ago
Pain in the ass for the employees and everybody really. You have to fill reports for weeks about some vague stuff. And then they come to inspect and it's more pain and more time not actually working. You can get help from third parties, but they take a big chunk of the money and they just make the process a little bit easier.
Khao 11y ago
I'm working on one of the startups mentioned on the website (although one that's buried way deep in the list). What I know as a dev : My company pays an outside firm specialized in getting R&D credits for companies. I don't really know how much it costs and how much it brings in. Every quarter, all the devs have to sit down and do a kind of interview with a guy from that firm. We're a pretty standard SaaS platform so it's hard to really know what can be considered R&D from my point of view. During the interview, we go over our work for the last quarter and dig into areas that could potentially be considered R&D. We'll explain in details what are the technical challenges, how what we're doing is different than what's already available out there, if we did prototyping, research, user testing, etc... Then they write up a nice report and try to get us as much R&D credit as they can!
ConfuciusSay02 11y ago
The credits are for "innovation", and it used to be that more or less everything was considered "innovation", and it was a huge joke, and basically every tech company that applied got tax credits. However, in the past 3 years or so, the government has cracked down on this and now it's extremely difficult and/or not worth the work that is involved to even apply for the credits.

Coincoin 11y ago

Pain in the ass for the employees and everybody really. You have to fill reports for weeks about some vague stuff. And then they come to inspect and it's more pain and more time not actually working. You can get help from third parties, but they take a big chunk of the money and they just make the process a little bit easier.

Khao 11y ago

I'm working on one of the startups mentioned on the website (although one that's buried way deep in the list). What I know as a dev : My company pays an outside firm specialized in getting R&D credits for companies. I don't really know how much it costs and how much it brings in. Every quarter, all the devs have to sit down and do a kind of interview with a guy from that firm. We're a pretty standard SaaS platform so it's hard to really know what can be considered R&D from my point of view. During the interview, we go over our work for the last quarter and dig into areas that could potentially be considered R&D. We'll explain in details what are the technical challenges, how what we're doing is different than what's already available out there, if we did prototyping, research, user testing, etc... Then they write up a nice report and try to get us as much R&D credit as they can!

ConfuciusSay02 11y ago

The credits are for "innovation", and it used to be that more or less everything was considered "innovation", and it was a huge joke, and basically every tech company that applied got tax credits. However, in the past 3 years or so, the government has cracked down on this and now it's extremely difficult and/or not worth the work that is involved to even apply for the credits.