The Challenge of Allocating Time to R&D
Every company has difficulty with timesheet management. In the R&D world, push typically comes to shove when it comes to:
- R&D Tax Credit (SR&ED) Claims
- Grant Claims for Innovation/R&D
Depending on the funding authority and how stringent they audit, timesheets can be a real headache to get right.
Why is it so difficult?
- Getting it right on a spectrum of risk: the highest risk approach is usually an allocation % of someone's time - e.g. "85% of Jill's time was R&D in this period". The lowest risk approach is usually the most onerous - a daily breakdown - e.g. "Jill spent 2.5hrs today on R&D work package X".
- Asking staff to do timesheets and adhere: Its often seen as a non-productive task, with some staff worried about the "big brother" watching over every task. Culturally, it can be difficult to introduce timesheets in companies whose revenue isn't labour quotation dependent.
- Inconsistency of requirements and templates: RD&I Grant funded projects may allow for commercialisation activities, travel time, and other activities. R&D Tax Credits (SR&ED) only allow for the carrying on of R&D. In addition, some authorities promote very specific templates to adhere to. Even if you're timelogging on a software package
ReaDI-Watch Solution
In addition to R&D Technological / Technical and Commercial progress reporting, ReaDI-Watch boasts a number of tools to track expenditure & labour allocation for RD&I funded projects.
Tracking Expenses & Budget Reports
In ReaDI-Watch, you can track your RD&I expenses against budgets. This can be done on a project level, and if there are multiple projects in a "claim", on a claim-level.
This simple-to-use tool allows for the:
- Creation of budget categories
- Allocation of expenses against each budget category
- Exportable expense & budget reports
These expenses & budgets are exported in various CSV and Excel Formats, which can be customized to meet specific grant funding requirements.
Tracking Labour Allocation & Exporting Timesheets
In ReaDI-Watch, you can track your RD&I directly in our platform, and/or integrate your timesheet tools (like Jira/Zoho) to track RD&I time:
- Add daily or weekly hours time entries against each team member, including descriptions
- Automatically link hours to RD&I work packages, as required for Grant funding purposes.
- Administrative functionalities & access permissions to allow other team members to time-log for each other (or not!)
- Customizable exports to different templates: To export timesheets in a format appropriate for your grant funding requirements, use our "export" tool available in the project menu. This export tool has a range of export functionalities (to Excel & CSV) - weekly, monthly, individual, team, specific time periods or project as a whole. This export can then be customized to suit the grant funding organisation.