While the client’s descriptions and recollections may give you enough information to prepare a claim, you need more tangible evidence of research and development (R&D) activities if you end up defending an enquiry at the First Tier Tax Tribunal (FTT).

It’s smart therefore to make sure you collect the evidence while you prepare the claim itself, so you have everything you need at hand already, if an enquiry letter arrives in the post.

And in fact, this is HMRC’s recommended approach. The Guidelines for Compliance in R&D Tax Relief (GfC3) point to the importance of contemporaneous evidence – that is, evidence collected at the time of the R&D activities.

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