An R&D Tax Incentive claim asks for two things that are difficult for different reasons. It asks you to describe a core activity in the ATO’s terms — hypothesis, experiment, observation, conclusion, and why the outcome could not have been known in advance. And it asks you to substantiate the cost, which means saying which hours, by which people, went to which activity.
Most of the industry solves the first with a consultant and the second with a spreadsheet built in July for work done in the previous September.
The documents have the structure built in
Projects hold sub-projects, activities, experiments and runs, each with the sections the claim needs: Objective, Hypothesis, Rationale, Eligibility, Compliance, Failures, Budget, Prior-art searches, Test plan, Analysis, Conclusion. Forty-seven screens of it, with the ATO’s own framing in the prompt templates rather than in a consultant’s head.
The AI writes into fields, not over the file
Every field has an assistant attached to it. It can transform what you wrote — tone, or first to third person — extract names and entities, suggest expansions or improvements, or generate a first pass. There is a multi-turn chat against the field when one pass is not enough.
What it will not do is fill a gap by guessing. Where the model does not know something it marks it, visibly, rather than producing a fluent sentence with a fabricated fact in the middle. You are left with a document and a list of the things only you can answer.
Costing, matched rather than estimated
The cost-matching pipeline reads:
- activities from the compliance record,
- work items from Jira or Azure DevOps,
- payroll from Xero.
It matches them, lets you correct the matches, reconciles hours up the parent tree so a sub-activity’s hours roll into its activity, and exports a cost report. Your corrections persist, so the second year is not the first year again.
And the same records are already there
The hours came from timesheets you kept for payroll. The work items came from the tracker your engineers were using anyway. Nothing in this section asked you to record anything new — it asked to be pointed at what you already record.