Product Roadmap: January–March 2023

Author: Alex Hewitt Published: 25^th May, 2023

As FY2024 starts to fly past (how did we get to May already?!) here’s a quick look at everything we’ve been doing recently, and everything we’ll be working on over the next few months. Unsurprisingly, we’re very focused on making sure that the WhisperClaims app remains compliant with all of HMRC’s requirements relating to R&D tax relief, as well as being easy and intuitive to use.

To start…

Q4 Highlights:

New eligible categories

To align with changes that came into force for claims starting on or after 1st April 2023, we’re added Pure Mathematics as an eligible area of science and added data licence and cloud computing costs to the software costs section.

Claim notification

In a similar vein, we’ve added a question to make sure our users have notified HMRC about their client’s intention to claim R&D tax relief, where necessary.

Overseas expenditure

We added in checks to ensure that, for claims starting after 1st April 2023, all subcontract and EPW costs were paid to UK companies. We’ve now pushed these changes out to 1st April 2024, in line with the announcements made at the Spring Budget.

Additional information form

Finally, we made a start on the changes necessary to enable us to create an output compatible with HMRC’s additional information form.

Coming up!

So, having done all of that, what are we planning to do over the next three months?

Additional Information Form

Now that the Additional Information implementation date has been moved to August 2023 for all claims, we’re full steam ahead on the rest of the changes required to comply with this.

What we’ll be doing is:

Adding a series of questions to help our users work out how many detailed project descriptions to include in the claim report and additional information form;
Updating how we gather the costs to enable the calculation of costs per project, aligning with the additional information form.

Both of these points require major re-engineering of the backend of the app, so we’ll be working very hard to get this finished and released ahead of 1st August 2023, after which an additional information form will be required for all claim submissions.