Founder, engineer, adviser: who does what in an R&D claim

A common reason good R&D claims go wrong is that the wrong person does the wrong part. The accountant guesses at which code was experimental. The engineer never gets asked what they actually did not know. The founder signs off on a number nobody can trace. A defensible claim needs three roles working together, each doing the part only they can.

Here is who does what, why it matters, and where our tool fits in.

This is general information, not tax advice. Your registered tax adviser determines and lodges your actual claim.

The engineer: the only one who knows the technical story

The heart of an R&D claim is a set of facts only your engineers hold. Was the outcome genuinely unknown, or did you just not happen to have built it before? What was the hypothesis going in? Which approaches did you try and abandon? Where did the real technical uncertainty sit, as opposed to the parts that were merely fiddly?

No accountant can answer these by reading your code, and no founder can answer them for a system they did not build. The engineer is the source of truth for the technical narrative, and a claim that skips them is built on guesswork. Their job is to attest, honestly, to the uncertainty and the systematic work that resolved it, pointing at the real artefacts that back it up.

The good news is that this does not require writing a report. It requires answering specific questions about specific pieces of work: "you reworked this three times with two reverts, what did you not know going in?"

The founder: owns the scope, the numbers, and the honesty

The founder (or whoever runs the company) owns the decisions that shape the claim. What counts as in-scope versus routine. How much of each person's time genuinely went to R&D. Whether the apportionment is reasonable and the figures are real.

This is an attestation role, and it carries weight. The company is the one making the claim, so someone with authority has to stand behind the numbers and the basis for them: who spent what time on which experiment, and why that split is defensible. The founder is also the one with the most at stake in getting it right, because the company, not the adviser, bears the consequences of a claim that does not hold up.

The healthiest mindset here is conservative: the founder's job is as much to scope work out as in, and to ask of each candidate "would this survive someone arguing it was routine".

The registered tax adviser: reviews, determines, lodges

The registered tax agent or R&D adviser is the professional backstop, and the only party who can actually lodge. They review the substantiation, apply their judgment on eligibility, handle the tax treatment and the interaction with your return, and take responsibility for the lodged claim. They are the ones who must be able to defend it to the ATO.

This is a regulated role for good reason, and it is not one a software tool can or should replace. Tax advice and lodgement sit with your adviser. What they need from everyone upstream is a clear, evidenced package they can review efficiently, rather than a pile of raw history they have to reconstruct a claim from.

Where the tool fits

Notice the gap in the middle. The engineer holds the technical truth but does not know the four-gate test. The adviser knows the test but cannot extract the technical truth from your codebase. Bridging that gap, turning what your engineers did into substantiation an adviser can review, is the labour-intensive part, and historically it is done in slow back-and-forth meetings.

That bridge is what our tool automates. It reads your development history and finds the candidate experiments, so the engineer is answering pointed questions about real work instead of facing a blank page. It structures each answer against the gates and ties the numbers to specific pull requests, so the founder is attesting to a traceable breakdown rather than a guess. And it produces an adviser-ready package, so your adviser spends their time on judgment and review rather than reconstruction.

We are deliberately not in the adviser's seat. We prepare and substantiate; your registered adviser reviews, determines eligibility, and lodges, and remains the backstop. Three roles, each doing the part only they can, with the tedious bridge in the middle taken care of.

This article is general information, not tax advice, and not a determination of eligibility. Speak to a registered tax adviser before lodging an R&D Tax Incentive claim.