Beyond Compliance: Boost Your Clients' Cash Flows With R&D Tax Credits

As a CPA, you’re often pulled in many different directions while pursuing your clients’ success. Business owners trust you to provide comprehensive tax planning, guide them through complex tax regulations, and ensure they meet their regulatory obligations to tax authorities like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). But what if you could not only maintain your clients’ compliance but also boost their cash flow significantly?

Enter Research & Development (R&D) tax credits.

Federal and state-level R&D tax programs are designed to reward companies for investing in innovation. Yet many American companies – across sectors like engineering, manufacturing, and technology – remain unaware of these lucrative opportunities.

Your pursuit of R&D tax credits can sharpen your clients’ competitive edge by: 

• Increasing their cash flow, generating savings, and freeing funds for other business needs or reinvestment: externally, internally, or in the pet projects your clients have contemplated for years.
• Reducing their tax liability, directly offsetting tax burdens, and decreasing overall financial obligations.
• Maximizing their time by rendering company profitability one less thing to worry about. What could your client do daily with an additional hour?

First introduced in 1981 to temporarily boost the economy, the federal R&D tax credit became an established tax-code fixture due to its substantiated ability to spur innovation. Companies can claim this credit by documenting R&D activities, calculating qualified research expenses (QREs), and reporting the credit via IRS Form 6765 when filing their annual tax return.

What Work Qualifies as R&D?

It's not all lab coats and microscopes! Qualification boils down to the investigation of science-based problems using experimentation, so the breadth of eligible activities may surprise you. 

Acena partners with taxpayers who are:

• Creating inventions to manufacture products for customer sale, lease, or license.
• Designing new or improved products or processes.
• Developing formulas with maximized efficacy and minimized off-target effects.
• Fabricating, testing, and iterating prototypes to enhance their performance or reliability.
• Investigating different materials or production methods to increase product quality.
• Upgrading existing software or technology to perform new functions.

Your clients’ efforts do not need to succeed for the expenses to qualify as R&D!

Hone your Skills as a Trusted Advisor

Acena Consulting supports you as you protect your clients’ bottom line. We can help you:

• Identify promising opportunities: 
  • Build relationships with clients who may be eligible for untapped R&D tax credits.
• Give expert guidance: 
  • Advise business owners and CFOs on the qualification process and evolving documentation requirements for specific R&D tax-credit programs.
• Perform excellent service: 
  • Deliver accurate results with integrity. 

Acena navigates the complexities of R&D tax-credit studies while remaining responsive to each client’s unique needs.

We stand behind our work and – in the unlikely event of an audit – defend it at no additional charge.

Take the Next Step

Acena Consulting understands your priorities as a responsible CPA. Our President and Head Coach, Randy Eickhoff, is a licensed CPA who made his name at Arthur Andersen and has collaborated with more than 500 mid-level and Fortune 500 companies during his prolific career.

We want to partner with you! Please contact us today for a free consultation to learn more about Acena’s conservative, hands-on, and technically driven approach to R&D tax credits. 

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Special thanks to Nick Pyzow, Director at Acena Consulting.

Edited by Randy Eickhoff, CPA, Founder and Head Coach at Acena Consulting. Photo courtesy of Words as Pictures on StockSnap.