Treating storytelling as a secondary tool in your funding acquisition process could cost you thousands of dollars. Effective communication is crucial in STEM fields for persuading others to fund your research and development work, and it should be number 1. Two companies with identical projects can have different SR&ED claim outcomes based on their descriptions.
Language should not embellish weak work but should accurately represent a project’s uncertainty and experimental nature, which is often overlooked by technical teams when writing reports for the Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax credit.
The CRA doesn’t give you much space to explain your project. The description sections of form T661 are found in 242, 244, and 246, with 350, 700, and 350-word limitations, respectively. So conciseness is key.
In this article, I’ll break down how you can use language to your advantage in your SR&ED claim.
For example purposes, I’ll use the public-facing SR&ED sample reports provided by the CRA as references throughout this article. One is an IT report, and the other is agriculture-based.
Start With the Knowledge Problem
The problem description falls under section 242. This is your chance to demonstrate what kind of issue you attempted to address with your study. Be sure to state the project objective at the very beginning so that everything you write afterward is framed around it.
Waiting to mention the problem can get the reviewer focused on your background, summary and business process and distract them from your demonstration of SR&ED category knowledge.
Your business problem is not a technological uncertainty.
Uncertainty begins when you encounter a specified problem that your regular business processes cannot resolve. The public-facing CRA sample SR&ED reports highlight this well.
| Example | Business Objective | Technological Uncertainty |
| IT | Develop a more energy-efficient cryptocurrency | Can the principles of backoff mechanisms be adapted to the specific nature of Blockchain networks to process transactions with minimal duplicates while maintaining fairness among nodes? |
| Agriculture | To produce strawberries | To understand the occurrence of BRR disease symptoms in strawberry plants among different fields and determine cultural practices that could be applied to control this pathogen that do not involve the use of conventional pesticides. |
This section is also the best place to state the specific metrics you are pursuing as objectives. Being specific shows that you have a concrete goal and demonstrates to the reviewer that you actually conducted the work. The “why” of the project is also essential to highlight consistently throughout this section. If a solution already exists for your issue, why did you choose to conduct further work to address it? Harp on why existing solutions were inadequate, harp on why they wouldn’t apply and clearly position your work as SR&ED work.
The language you should focus on in this section is:
“could not determine, could not find, did not address, did not meet, uncertainty, limitation”
Use Language That Shows Experimentation
In line 244 of the SR&ED form T661, show off your scientific knowledge and jargon, while still remaining coherent. Speak in the language of the expert who executed the project and keep the following format in mind:
- What did you know?
- What did you hypothesize?
- How did you test said hypothesis?
- What did you observe?
- What did you learn from said observations
Choose verbs such as tested, compared, simulated, analyzed, and determined to show the progression of the investigation. Get granular about the tests completed and what you intended to learn by conducting them.
Recall the uncertainties you mentioned above and reference them in each paragraph. The best approach is to dedicate a paragraph to each uncertainty. That way, you stay on task with the description.
The CRA sample reports active this well:
In the agricultural project:
- They observed that BRR symptoms differed by field.
- They could not explain why.
- They proposed microbial diversity as an explanation.
- They tested soil samples.
- The results supported the first idea.
- They conducted another experiment.
- The results supported the second idea.
They ultimately gained an understanding of the relationship between soil microbial diversity and disease suppression.
Embrace Your Failures: Why Dead Ends Prove Experimentation
This is also the spot to describe the failures. Emphasize them and dwell on them to show project progression. Without failures, the project may appear to be a simple standard solution, which might kick it out of the eligibility bracket and achieve the opposite of your objectives.
In the public-facing CRA example, the proposed Fairness of Work (FoW) mechanism successfully reduced redundant mining operations by 40%.
However, the example clearly states that performance began to degrade when the number of nodes exceeded 200,000. In the advancement section, this limitation is revisited, explaining that the mechanism did not scale well beyond 200,000 active miners due to nonconvergence issues in its propagation.
The team could have chosen not to discuss the conditions under which their project encountered challenges, but by doing so, they strengthened their narrative with concrete evidence from their trials. This transparency supports technological advancement by demonstrating what did not work.
Preferred language for this section:
formulated, designed, implemented, tested, analyzed, compared, simulated, modified, validated
Describe What You Learned, Not Just What You Built
In the advancement section, focus on describing what you learned. Link it to your technological uncertainties and show traceable progress and advancement. Frame advancement as: “Before the project, we did not know X. Through the work, we determined Y.” Recall the metrics and numbers that you cited in the work done section and link them to the results or learning you achieved.
In the public-facing examples:
| Example | Product Progression | Technological advancement |
| IT | “We developed FoW.” | “We demonstrated that principles from the WLAN backoff mechanism could be adapted to blockchain under certain conditions, determined how partial information could emulate carrier sensing, and identified a scalability limitation.” |
| Agriculture | “We developed a better strawberry-growing process.” | “We gained an understanding of the soil characteristics associated with suppression of BRR.” |
The language to focus on in this section is:
“found, demonstrated, showed, determined, gained an understanding”
Ready to claim SR&ED tax credits? Leyton Can Help!
SR&ED consultants spend every day framing and formulating reports for this very purpose. If learning all this nuance feels daunting to you, you can enlist the help of an expert. Most Leyton consultants have written over 300 SR&ED reports and can churn out the required narrative in just a few days.
Our team of experts can help you navigate the world of government funding and tax incentives for rapidly evolving industries.