The questions firms actually ask.
Partnership terms first, because that’s what gets asked first. The technical answers are below, written so you can forward them to a client without editing them.
Working together
What’s the difference between referral and white-label?
Under a referral, you make the introduction and we contract with the client directly. The study runs under our name, you carry no delivery risk and no engagement letter for the credit work, and you’re paid a referral fee on every claim we file.
Under white-label, the engagement is yours. You sign the client, you set the price, and you invoice. We do the qualification, the computation, and the study, and deliver it to you branded as your firm’s. We bill you a fixed partner rate per claim.
Will you try to win my client’s accounting or tax work?
No, and it isn’t a matter of goodwill. The partnership agreement restricts us to R&D tax credit work for any client you introduce. Not the bookkeeping, not the return, not CFO advisory, not this year and not next.
We also don’t market adjacent services to those clients during the engagement or after it.
Who owns the client relationship?
You do. Under white-label the client may never learn we exist. Under referral, we coordinate with you before we contact the client and we return results through you unless you tell us otherwise.
Who signs and files the credit forms?
You do. You keep preparing and signing the client’s return. We deliver the completed study, the computation, and Form 6765 with the Section G detail, prepared and ready to attach, plus the substantiation file behind it.
If the claim is ever examined, we support it. That support is in the agreement, not an add-on.
How are fees structured?
Every study is quoted as a fixed fee after a short scoping call, before any work begins. There is no hourly clock and no change order for a study that turns out to be more involved than it looked.
Referral partners are paid a fee on each filed claim. White-label partners pay a fixed partner rate per claim and set their own client price on top.
What does my firm actually have to do?
Identify the clients who might qualify and make the introduction. That’s the whole obligation.
We handle eligibility screening, the technical interviews, the expense analysis, the documentation, and the form preparation. What we need from the client is typically an hour or two of an engineer’s time.
How does client data stay secure?
Data moves through a secure portal rather than email attachments, and access is scoped to the study team working the file. Confidentiality terms are part of the partnership agreement, and study files are retained seven years so a later examination has something to look at.
How do we get started?
One call about your book of business and which model fits, then a short partnership agreement. After that, send us a first client and we’ll run a no-cost review before anyone commits to anything.
R&D credit basics
What is the R&D tax credit?
It’s a federal credit under §41 for companies that develop or improve products, software, or processes in the United States. Unlike a deduction it comes off tax owed dollar for dollar, and roughly 36 states run a credit of their own on top of it.
It is not a grant and not an incentive you apply for. It’s claimed on the return, and it stands or falls on the evidence behind it.
Who qualifies?
Any company whose work passes the IRS four-part test: a permitted purpose, a technological basis, technical uncertainty at the outset, and a process of experimentation to resolve it.
In practice that reaches much further than laboratories: software companies, manufacturers, engineering and architecture firms, biotech, hardware, even food and beverage producers reformulating a product. What matters is the uncertainty and the experimentation, not the industry code.
What counts as a qualified research expense?
Four categories: wages for employees performing, supervising, or supporting qualified research; supplies consumed in the work; 65% of amounts paid to US contractors doing qualified research; and cloud computing used for development.
Wages are almost always the largest piece, which is why the study starts with payroll rather than with a survey.
How much is it worth?
For the federal credit, typically 6–10% of qualified research expenses on the Alternative Simplified method, before any state credit. Against total US engineering spend rather than against QREs alone, a company usually recovers somewhere in the 10–15% range.
It recurs. A company that qualifies this year generally qualifies next year, which is what makes it worth building into a client relationship rather than treating as a one-off.
Can a company with no income tax use the credit?
Yes, and this is the case that surprises firms most. A qualified small business, one under $5 million in gross receipts for the year and within five years of having its first gross receipts, can elect to apply up to $500,000 of the credit per year against employer payroll taxes instead of income tax.
For a pre-revenue company that means real cash: FICA it stops remitting, quarter by quarter, starting the quarter after the return is filed.
Can a company claim the credit for past years?
Usually. Open tax years, typically the past three, can be amended to claim a credit that was missed, and unused credits carry forward up to 20 years.
Whether a look-back is worth running depends on how much contemporaneous evidence still exists. We’d rather tell you it isn’t than file something thin.
What changed with §174 and R&D expensing?
Tax years 2022 through 2024 required domestic research costs to be capitalized and amortized over five years, which produced tax bills that shocked a lot of profitable startups. 2025 legislation restored full expensing of domestic R&D costs for tax years beginning after December 31, 2024.
§174 and the §41 credit are separate rules that touch the same spend, so we surface the §174 position alongside the credit and hand it back to you for the return.
What documentation survives an IRS audit?
Contemporaneous records that tie specific people and specific dollars to specific qualified activities: a project list, technical narratives mapped to the four-part test, payroll allocations with a stated basis, and evidence of the experimentation itself: design iterations, test results, tickets, commits.
What doesn’t survive is a percentage applied to a department and a paragraph of prose. Every QRE row in our studies traces back to its source.
Ready to add the credit to your firm?
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.