Most software teams qualify. Few can defend it.
If your engineers solved problems with no off-the-shelf answer, that work probably qualifies for UK R&D tax relief. The harder part - since 2024 - is proving it. Here's what HMRC actually looks for, and how Aven evidences it.
The two questions HMRC actually asks
Was there a technical advance?
You must be seeking an appreciable improvement in a field of science or technology - not just something new to your company, but an advance in overall capability. Routine application of existing techniques doesn’t count.
Was there genuine uncertainty?
A matter is an uncertainty only if a competent professional in the field couldn’t readily work it out from public knowledge without significant effort. “Hard for us” isn’t enough; “not readily deducible by an expert” is the bar.
What a defensible claim must show
HMRC’s Additional Information Form asks each project to set out five things. Aven structures every narrative around them.
Field of technology
The area of science or technology your project advances - e.g. distributed systems, ML, compilers.
Baseline
The state of the art you started from: what was already publicly known or readily available.
The advance
The appreciable improvement in capability you sought - faster, more scalable, newly possible.
The uncertainty
The technical unknowns a competent professional couldn't readily resolve from public knowledge.
The approach
How you tackled the uncertainty: the experiments, iterations and dead ends along the way.
Qualifying vs routine - for software teams
- Novel scaling or performance work (e.g. holding latency targets at orders-of-magnitude more load)
- Algorithmic, ML and pure-maths work (pure mathematics is in scope from April 2023)
- Distributed-systems consistency, concurrency and fault-tolerance problems
- Work constrained by hardware, real-time or resource limits with no known solution
- Standard CRUD apps, websites and cosmetic UI
- Routine bug fixes and configuration
- Integrating documented, off-the-shelf APIs and SDKs
- Commercial (non-technological) uncertainty - e.g. “will it sell?”
Proven from your git history - not a questionnaire
Most advisers reconstruct your projects from a workshop months later. Aven reads the contemporaneous record - the commits, pull requests and tickets you already created - and wires each one to the advance and uncertainty it evidences. That trail is exactly what an HMRC enquiry asks for.
Read-only by design: Aven ingests commit messages, PR and ticket text and metadata - never your source code. Every claim in the pack links back to the record that proves it.
Scheme awareness, not scheme selection
For accounting periods beginning on or after 1 April 2024 there are two routes - the merged R&D expenditure-credit scheme, and Enhanced R&D Intensive Support (ERIS) for loss-making, R&D-intensive SMEs. Which applies to you is your accountant’s determination, not ours. We make the evidence defensible either way. Read the regime explained
Aven assembles R&D evidence packs for accountant review; Aven Reviewed adds expert review. Aven does not file with HMRC, determine your liability, select your scheme (merged vs ERIS), sequence loss relief, or guarantee any amount - those are your accountant or R&D tax firm’s responsibility. Figures are indicative and conservative. Nothing here is tax advice. UK only.
See if you have a defensible claim.
The Eligibility & Readiness assessment is free, takes a few minutes, and tells you honestly whether Aven is the right fit.
Check your eligibility - free