Why Once-a-Year R&D Claims Fall Short

Most R&D tax relief claims get done the same way: once a year, from memory, in the weeks before a deadline. 

Someone in finance pulls together a list of projects. Someone in engineering tries to remember what actually happened 11 months ago. A claim gets assembled, checked once, and sent off. Then everyone moves on until next year, when the whole process starts again from scratch. 

For some, this might work. For most, it leaves money on the table. 

Why the old approach is starting to show its cracks 

HMRC is looking harder at R&D claims than it used to. Compliance checks are now a normal part of the process, not the exception, and a claim that’s thin on detail is the one most likely to get picked up. 

But a rushed, once-a-year claim doesn’t just risk scrutiny, it also tends to undersell what R&D activity really went on throughout the year. Costs get missed. Projects get left out because nobody had time to make the case for them properly. The same pressure that makes a claim risky is often the reason it’s smaller than it should be. 

The businesses getting the most out of R&D tax relief aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest R&D budgets. They’re the ones who track meticulously and can describe, clearly and specifically, what problem they were trying to solve, why it was hard, and who worked on it, without having to reconstruct any of it from memory months later. 

Growth changes the maths 

This matters most for businesses that are scaling, because scaling businesses are the ones changing fastest. New hires join mid-project. Subcontractors get brought in for a few months and then move on. A product line that started as R&D quietly turns into the core of the business. Each of those shifts changes what can be claimed and how it needs to be evidenced. 

A once-a-year claim, built from a conversation or two, struggles to keep up with a business that looks completely different at the end of the year as it did at the beginning. It’s not that your everyday R&D specialist is incompetent. It’s that they weren’t there throughout the year, and that matters. 

What changes when R&D becomes a year-round conversation 

A business doesn’t stay still for 12 months. New projects start. Old ones pivot, stall, or turn out to be more technically uncertain than anyone expected going in. A developer solves something new and exciting. None of that gets captured if the only time anyone talks about R&D is at year end. 

Working with a specialist throughout the year, rather than calling one in at deadline time, changes what the claim is built from. Instead of trying to reverse-engineer 12 months of work into a narrative that satisfies HMRC’s definitions, the record gets built as the work happens. Costs get identified while they’re still fresh, not estimated afterwards. Projects that quietly qualify, without anyone realising it at the time, get caught before the deadline instead of after it. 

It also changes what happens if HMRC does come back with questions. A claim built from contemporaneous notes and real conversations holds up. A claim reconstructed from memory under time pressure is the one that starts to wobble the moment someone asks a follow-up question. 

“Maximise your claim” gets a whole new meaning 

The best way to maximise your claim isn’t inflating it with guesswork, numbers stretched to fill in the gaps because nobody can quite remember the details months later.  

The real version of “maximise” is having a specialist in your corner all year who can catch every qualifying project and cost as it happens, not just the obvious ones that spring to mind at year end. That’s what truly maximises a claim: not a bigger guess, but a complete one. And because it’s built on real evidence from the year rather than reconstructed after-the-fact, it’s watertight too, which matters just as much as the number itself. 

Treating R&D relief like a relationship, not a transaction 

A once-a-year R&D claim can only ever be as good as what someone remembers to mention. A year-round one is built from what actually happened. For scaling businesses especially, where the shape of the company changes weekly, that gap adds up fast, and it’s surprising how much gets missed when nobody’s watching in between. 

If your R&D tax relief process currently happens just once a year, it might be worth asking what it’s missing the rest of the time. 

Find out more at our upcoming event on 22^nd September 2026

(and get a FREE audit of your last R&D claim) 

R&D expert Jonny Brewster and his team are running a session on what a year-round approach to R&D tax relief looks like in practice, and how it makes claims bigger and better protected at the same time.  

If your R&D claim currently lives in a folder marked “January,” it’s aimed squarely at you. 

Date: Tuesday, 22 September 2026 
Time: 12:30pm (with lunch provided) 

Location: The Stadium, Scale Space, White City, W12 7RZ 

 
Places are limited – please RSVP as soon as possible using the link here to confirm whether you are able to join us.