The tax break was real. The file is what made it stick.

What was broken

An innovative clean-energy startup had developed proprietary waste processing technology but was unaware that it qualified for a statutory income-tax exemption available to recognized innovative companies. The founders were preparing for expansion and wanted to preserve cash for product development rather than paying avoidable income tax.

What we did

CapEasy evaluated the company's eligibility, documented its innovation narrative, prepared technical and commercial justifications, coordinated with the founders to compile supporting evidence, and managed the complete application process under the applicable innovation-recognition framework.

Where it landed

The startup successfully secured formal recognition, making it eligible for a three-year income tax exemption. The tax savings strengthened the company’s cash flow and allowed management to accelerate investment in research, manufacturing, and market expansion.

The claim belongs to your CPA. The file behind it is a year-round job.

Section 80IAC recognition was not won by finding the right form — it was won by building a file that could survive a reviewer reading it cold: the technical narrative, the commercial justification, the evidence tying the company’s own activity to the statute’s test. The equivalent US moment is a federal research credit claim or a QSBS exclusion at exit: the tax position exists in the Internal Revenue Code either way, but a reviewer only accepts it if the file behind it was built contemporaneously, not reconstructed under deadline pressure.

That distinction is now explicit in IRS procedure. The instructions to Form 6765 direct taxpayers to "maintain any records required by Regulations section 1.41-4(d) and section 6001" to substantiate qualified research expenses — the credit is not self-proving from a general ledger balance; it depends on records kept as the work happened. This is the CPA’s claim to sign. It is our job to make sure the file underneath it is already built when they sit down to sign it.

What the R&D credit file actually has to hold

Form 6765’s Section G is the concrete test of what "documented" means for a research credit claim. For tax years beginning after 2025 it becomes a required part of the return (with limited exceptions), and it asks for the credit broken out by business component — covering at least 80% of total qualified research expenses, capped at the top 50 components, each one identified by name, type (product, process, or other), and, for software, whether it is internal-use, dual-function, or neither. Each component then carries its own wage, supply, rental, and contract-research amounts.

That structure only comes out of a system that tags time and cost to a project as the work happens — engineering hours coded to the component they built, supply spend tied to the experiment it supported, contractor invoices mapped to the same components. Reconstructing that breakdown after the fiscal year closes, from memory and old calendar invites, is exactly the kind of after-the-fact narrative that a reviewer discounts. The bookkeeping discipline is not optional scaffolding around the credit — under the current Form 6765 instructions, it is the credit.

QSBS runs on a clock and a snapshot, not a claim at exit

Section 1202 of the Internal Revenue Code excludes gain on qualified small business stock, but two tests have to be true on dates that already happened by the time anyone thinks to check them: the stock has to be held past a statutory holding period, and the issuing corporation’s aggregate gross assets cannot have exceeded the statutory ceiling at issuance and immediately after — historically $50 million, per the codified text of section 1202(d). The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (2025) revised the holding-period and asset-threshold rules for stock issued after July 4, 2025, which is exactly why a corporation’s issuance date, and the gross-assets figure on that date, needs to be on file at the time of issuance, not reconstructed from old cap table exports when a founder is trying to sell secondary shares five years later.

The file we build is the same shape as the 80IAC evidence pack: a dated snapshot of the balance sheet at each stock issuance, an option grant and ledger that ties every share to the instrument that created it, and a clean chain a CPA or exit counsel can trace without guessing. Whether the stock ultimately qualifies, and at what exclusion, is a determination for your tax advisor at the time of sale — our part is making sure the underlying record was never in question.