What was broken
An agri-tech startup qualified on merit for a government grant scheme but was struggling with the application itself — the technical narrative, financial projections, and supporting documentation were not aligned with what the evaluating body required, and earlier drafts risked rejection on process grounds.
What we did
CapEasy built the application to the scheme’s specification: articulating the innovation and impact narrative, preparing defensible financial projections and a detailed project report, and compiling the eligibility and supporting documents in the required format. We managed the submission and responded to the evaluators’ queries.
Where it landed
The startup submitted a complete, well-substantiated application that cleared the evaluation process. The documentation also became a reusable base for future grant and incentive applications.
Winning the grant and keeping it are two different documentation jobs
Most Australian government support for a growing business does not arrive as a cheque for a plan — it arrives as a claim against evidence, or as a right to a tax offset you have to prove you earned. The Export Market Development Grants (EMDG) program, run through business.gov.au and Austrade, is a reimbursement grant: businesses submit claims against eligible export promotion expenses they have already incurred, up to the round’s allocation (up to $104.5 million was available for 2025–26, and the same amount for 2026–27, per business.gov.au). The application itself was the hard part in this AgriTech engagement; in the EMDG model, the hard part restarts every claim cycle, because the evaluator is now asking "show me you spent it," not "show me you deserve it."
The R&D Tax Incentive (R&DTI) runs the same way in reverse: a company self-assesses its eligible R&D activities, registers them with AusIndustry each year, and only then claims the offset through its company tax return. Nothing is checked at the point of registration — the checking happens later, against whatever records exist. business.gov.au flags that the R&DTI itself is changing, with government-announced changes from the 2026–27 Budget starting 1 July 2028, which makes the underlying discipline — keep the file current every year, not just the year an audit lands — the only thing worth building process around.
The artefact is a project ledger, not a folder of receipts
The transferable piece of the AgriTech engagement is the financial projection and project report built to a named specification — not a generic set of accounts, but a document shaped to answer exactly what the evaluator asks. In Australia, the post-award version of that document is project accounting: grant-funded or claim-eligible spend coded and tracked separately from ordinary trading activity in the same ledger, so that at claim or registration time the numbers can be pulled straight out rather than reconstructed from twelve months of general expenses.
That separation matters for a second reason: a grant is income, and whether GST applies to it depends on whether there is a "sufficient nexus" between the payment and a supply the business makes to the grantor — a question the business’s own bookkeeping needs to be able to answer, not guess at retrospectively. Restricted-fund tracking of the kind used for grant money and the kind used for donor-restricted nonprofit money follow the same principle: money with strings attached gets its own trail in the ledger from the day it lands, not a note at year end.
Who reads the file, and what CapEasy prepares versus what they sign
Three different parties read this evidence, and none of them accept a verbal account. The grantor (Austrade for EMDG, AusIndustry/the ATO for the R&DTI) reads it at claim or registration time and again if selected for review. A lead investor or lender doing diligence on a grant-funded project reads it to confirm the money went where the grant said it would. And the company’s own registered BAS or tax agent reads it every quarter, because grant income and claimable expenditure flow through the same BAS and tax return the agent lodges.
CapEasy’s part mirrors the AgriTech engagement exactly, translated: building the project ledger, reconciling grant-coded spend to the bank feed, and preparing the schedules and narrative a claim or registration needs in the shape the scheme asks for. Everything is prepared for your registered BAS or tax agent to lodge, with eligibility and the claim decision sitting with the program and your agent.
What to take from it
- A grant application proves you deserve the money once; most Australian programs then ask you to prove you spent or earned it — repeatedly, on their schedule, not yours.
- EMDG pays against submitted evidence of expenses already incurred, not against a plan — code eligible spend separately in the ledger from day one, not at claim time.
- The R&DTI is self-assessed and registered annually with AusIndustry; the record has to exist before anyone asks for it, because nothing is checked at registration.
- Whether GST applies to a grant turns on the nexus between the payment and a supply — a bookkeeping answer your business needs on file, not a guess made at BAS time.
- Three different readers — the grantor, an investor doing diligence, and your registered agent — all read the same project ledger; build one file that satisfies all three, not three separate stories.