WhisperClaims’ take on the Research and Development Tax Credit Statistics 2018

It’s that time of year again. All over the country, R&D tax credit advisors and consultants are locking themselves away in darkened rooms, often with a marketing expert sitting alongside, and poring over the latest R&D tax credit statistics from HMRC. Their aim? Breaking the statistics down into nice, neat bitesize chunks to be pumped out into a series of blogs, tweets and posts. It’s thrilling, and we just can’t resist joining them!

Here at WhisperClaims, we might not have a darkened room or even a marketing expert to hand, but we are massive statistics nerds, and boy, are these massive statistics (badoom-tish!).

So, what have we learned from the Research and Development Tax Credits Statistics of September 2018? We could go on about how, if you look at the statistics one way, manufacturing companies are not making enough claims, or about how the number of claims made by Large Companies appears to be stagnating, but we’d rather focus on the good news – more and more companies making R&D tax credit claims.

In financial year 2015-16, 39,765 SMEs made claims for R&D tax credits, an increase of 25% compared to FY 2014-15. For the financial year 2016-17, 37,360 SMEs have already made claims, and this number will continue to increase over the next year as clients reach the deadline for claiming. When we crunch the numbers, we predict that this will reach over 47,000 claims.

What does this mean for the R&D tax credit market? Well, these numbers prove that the growth in R&D tax credit claims comes entirely from the SME market, many of whom are first time claimants making small claims, for whom the traditional consultancy approach just isn’t suitable as processing costs for claims, and ultimately the market price for such services, are simply too high. As this trend continues, consultants and accountants will be coming under increasing pressure to process more claims, for smaller companies, at rock-bottom prices and margin. How can this be done? Given the costs of running a consultancy team, that’s a pretty difficult challenge – but one that WhisperClaims was specifically created to tackle. See what the software does at www.whisperclaims.co.uk – we’re confident that you’ll see the benefits for yourself during a 30-day subscription-free trial!

And if you want to read the full HMRC report, you can find that here