The most important lesson we learned is not falling for the trap of paying a fixed percentage of your claim to an accounting firm. The guys we went to, and it was a big city firm, we got fooled by their office space and so on. They basically charged us a contingency based on the total rebate, and that ended up being more than the work they did.
They made it sound like we’d pay a 20% contingency on the claim, which sounds fine, but when you add up the work that’s involved it’s nowhere near worth it. Our first claim was in the order of 100-something thousand, and we paid $20,000 in grant fees. That’s a lot of money for what we know now is a straightforward process. We pay a fraction of that now.
You’re supposed to have an R&D project plan and that’s supposed to guide you over a number of years. We’re actually getting towards the end of our initial plan and it was essentially a document detailing what you wanted to do. You have to do something like that if you want to be successful in the R&D process.
The application forms are actually all quite straight forward, and if you follow the guidelines they’re not that onerous. It’s not going to take anyone more than a couple of weeks to get a decent project plan out there.
It’s more from a compliance cost thing. Measuring what you’ve done when you put your application in. There’s some tracking that goes with that, and you’re best off having some sort of project management tool that shows when you started building features, who worked on them, and so on.
Don’t pay anyone on contingency!
You’d be wise to keep good accounts. Back in 2008 I remember it being a bit of a pain to clean up all of our accounts and spending lines. Just get everything ready. Obviously we have a bookkeeper now and they handle all that, but you really just need to get on top of that. The more organised you are, the easier it’s going to be to get a successful grant.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
