SR&ED for Engineers and CTOs: Documentation Without Slowing Shipping

Engineering leaders are often skeptical of SR&ED — not because the credits are un valuable, but because traditional filing feels like a tax-season scavenger hunt through Git history. The fix is not more paperwork at year-end; it is building documentation into how your team already works.

Why Engineers Resist SR&ED

Common pain points: vague eligibility criteria, consultants who interview engineers for hours, narratives that do not match actual work, and fear that claiming SR&ED means labeling normal feature work as "research." Valid concerns — but solvable with the right workflow.

Integrate Documentation Into Dev Workflow

• Tag SR&ED projects in Jira/Linear — separate experimental work from routine maintenance
• Write PR descriptions that explain uncertainty — "tried X, failed because Y, next approach Z"
• Keep ADRs (Architecture Decision Records) for significant technical pivots
• Run mid-year eligibility checks — do not wait until March to discover gaps

What Qualifies vs. What Does Not

Building features on a known stack with predictable outcomes is product development, not SR&ED. Resolving technical uncertainty — "we do not know if this architecture scales to 10M events/sec" — with systematic experimentation is SR&ED. CTOs who draw this line clearly protect both shipping velocity and claim quality.

Tools for Engineering Teams

Start with the Eligibility Quiz to assess projects, use the T661 Checklist to track documentation completeness, and explore AI-assisted documentation that grounds narratives in your actual Git and ticket history — not generic prose.