Software & IT Industry

In order to drive business growth and meet the expectations of increasingly demanding customers they must take risks, experiment and innovate or face inevitable stagnation in a brutally competitive industry. In other words, they must carry out R&D. Many companies are benefiting from R&D tax relief on their software development expenses.

It’s widely acknowledge that establishing and defining qualifying R&D in the context of software development can be challenging. The perfect user experience – a holy grail for software developers – may not necessarily be an advance in science and technology (at least in therms of HMRC’s definition).

Examples of qualifying R&D in software development

• Intelligent software: programs with cognitive abilities, such as the software to drive autonomous cars and aircraft, or recommendations to persuade you to buy just one more pair of shoes
• High-performance software: from the largest computers to the smallest, smart engineers are squeezing the last drops of performance out of the hardware
• Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality: from Hollywood to your smartphone your world has never looked so beautiful
• Big data: recent years have seen an explosion in the number of devices, some scarcely recognisable as computers, recording data about the material world, and a corresponding explosion in the storage and processing of the data
• Green computing: not only software systems to help scientists to understand how the planet is warming up, but software to reduce the demand for energy too, and even software designed to need less power to operate itself.