Offer R&D tax creditswithout building the practice.
Your clients ask about the research credit. Now you have an answer. Refer them to us, or run the work under your own name. Either way you get a team that focuses on R&D credits and nothing else. Your accounting, tax, and advisory relationships stay yours.
Federal and state creditsForm 6765 with Section GAn audit-ready study with every claim
Clayton Vaughn · R&D Tax Lead
One study we ran. Every claim depends on the facts we review.
- years in business
12
- in credits issued
$70M
- average R&D tax credit
$90K
Two ways to work together.
Some firms want the credit off their plate entirely. Others want it on their letterhead. Both work. Pick the one that fits how you run your practice.
Referral
You make the introduction. We take it from there.
- You introduce the client and step back. We contract with them directly.
- You carry no delivery risk and no engagement letter for the credit work.
- We keep you copied on what matters and out of what doesn’t.
- You’re paid a referral fee on every claim we file.
the credit is occasional for you, or you’d rather not own a specialist deliverable.
White-label
The work runs under your firm’s name. We’re the back office.
- Your engagement letter, your invoice, your client relationship. Unchanged.
- We do the qualification, the computation, and the study, delivered to you.
- Deliverables carry your branding. The client sees your firm throughout.
- You set the fee. We bill you at a fixed partner rate per claim.
the research credit is a service you want to offer, not outsource visibly.
Not sure which? Most firms start with a referral and move to white-label once they’ve seen a study.
The platform your client logs into.
Every study runs on a portal your client can see: what’s outstanding, what’s been signed off, and what we’re still waiting on. Flip the brand to see what they’d see.
What we actually do.
The research credit is not a form you fill in. It’s a qualification argument, a defensible number, and a file that holds up in an audit. That’s the work.
Qualify the activity
We apply the §41 four-part test to real work like engineering, product development, and prototypes, and we’re honest about what doesn’t qualify.
Build the QRE base
Wages by research participation, supplies, contract research at 65%, and the cloud spend attributable to R&D.
Federal and state
We calculate the federal credit using both methods available, plus state credits in roughly 36 states after apportioning QREs.
The payroll-tax offset
For qualified small businesses, the credit can offset employer FICA instead of income tax, which is what makes it cash-valuable pre-profit.
§174 treatment
Research spend capitalizes and amortizes. We surface the §174 impact alongside the credit and hand it back to you for the return.
Substantiation that holds
Every QRE row traces to its source. Form 6765 including the Section G detail, and an audit-ready narrative.
We don’t compete with you.
This is the part every firm asks about, so let’s put it up front rather than make you drag it out of us.
R&D credits only
For any client you introduce, we do the research credit. Not the bookkeeping, not the return, not the CFO work.
No cross-selling. Ever.
We don’t pitch your clients on adjacent services. Not during the engagement, not after it, not next year.
In writing
The restriction is a clause in the partnership agreement, not a promise on a website. Ours is the one you can enforce.
Nothing goes around you
You see client-facing communication before it goes out. Under white-label, it goes out from you.
Your client stays your client. That’s the deal, and it’s the only reason this partnership works.
Light on your client. Light on you.
We work from payroll and ledger data, so most of the study builds itself. What we need from the client is an hour or two with someone technical to talk through what the engineering time actually went into.
- 01
No-cost review
Send us the payroll and accounting data. We come back with a conservative estimate of the credit and whether it’s worth running at all.
- 02
Engagement
A separate, standardized engagement per tax year, referral or white-label, priced the same way each time. No custom quote to negotiate.
- 03
The study
We build the QREs, compute federal and state, and write the substantiation. One or two hours of your client’s engineering time, and we handle the rest.
- 04
Filed and offset
The credit goes onto the return. For qualified small businesses electing the payroll offset, the benefit shows up as FICA the client stops paying, quarter by quarter.
Firms always want a number before they’ll make an introduction, so here’s the honest one. A company typically gets back 10–15% of what it spends on US-based engineering and development that qualifies. A startup with $300,000 in qualifying salaries is usually looking at a credit somewhere around $30,000–$40,000.
The payroll-offset route generally requires under $5 million in gross receipts for the year and being within the first five years of having gross receipts. Past that, the credit is still worth claiming. It just offsets income tax instead of payroll tax.
And not everything counts. Building the product qualifies. The marketing site doesn’t.
Qualifying US engineering salaries
$300,000
Credit, federal
$30,000–$40,000
Let’s talk.
Tell us about your firm and we’ll come back with what a partnership would look like, referral or white-label, and what the economics are. If it’s not a fit we’ll say so.