Product Update: Autumn / Winter 2025

Welcome to our Autumn / Winter product update.

Over the past few months we’ve been focused on one major priority – ensuring WhisperClaims continues to handle the growing complexity of R&D tax relief rules for accountants and advisers preparing claims under the new regime.

Alongside our usual improvements and fixes, this period has seen the launch of a significant new capability and a number of important safeguards.

NI ERIS claims now supported

In October, we launched full support for NI ERIS, building on the work we carried out earlier this year to align our platform with the merged R&D scheme rules.

With NI ERIS now live, WhisperClaims is once again capable of handling any UK R&D claim for any company under the correct scheme.

Making NI ERIS work properly isn’t just a label change. Our platform dynamically assesses eligibility limits and prior state aid history in a way that reflects how HMRC actually applies the rules under the NI ERIS scheme.

Specifically the platform now:

• Identifies NI-registered companies by pulling more data from Companies House, ensuring only genuinely eligible companies are routed towards NI ERIS.
• Handles opt-in and opt-out decisions, capturing information about the activities of the company and validating whether an election is available and whether it has been made.
• Tracks prior de minimis aid, including when it was received and how much remains available.
• Accounts for previous NI ERIS claims, calculating their impact on current eligibility.
• Calculates de minimis limits, automatically determining how much qualifying expenditure can be claimed under ERIS without breaching thresholds.

Early data suggests that only around 20% of claims meet NI ERIS criteria and Northern Irish companies continue to represent a relatively small proportion of overall claimants. Even so, our platform is fully prepared, whether you see one NI ERIS claim a year, or many.

Safeguards for longer periods of account

We’ve also introduced an important control around longer periods of account. Where a single period of account spans both the old and new R&D regimes, WhisperClaims now prevents a claim from being prepared incorrectly across incompatible rulesets.

This change removes a subtle but high-risk failure point and ensures claims prepared in WhisperClaims remain compliant, even where accounting periods don’t align neatly with legislative change.

AI Review feature: beta update

Our AI Review feature has seen strong early uptake, alongside thoughtful and constructive feedback from our users. Before moving to a full release in early 2026, we’ll be making a number of refinements based on how the tool is being used in real claim preparation scenarios. As always, the focus is on supporting professional judgement, not replacing it.

What’s coming next

We’ve recently completed some scheduled maintenance work, and our focus now shifts to usability and workflow improvements, including:

• A new claims management dashboard
• The ability to upload and store supporting documents
• Enhancements to outputs and reporting

These changes are designed to make it easier to manage multiple claims, maintain audit-ready records and improve visibility across the claim preparation process.

Want to know more?

If you’re already a customer and have feedback or questions about these updates, our support team would love to hear from you.

If you’re not yet using WhisperClaims and would like to see how our structured workflows, built-in compliance logic and Advice Line support help firms prepare R&D claims with confidence, you can book a demo with the team to see it in action.

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