The SR&ED time-tracking sheet

Almost every claim that runs into trouble on review runs into trouble in the same place. Not the science, and not the eligibility. The hours.

A company describes genuinely eligible work, and then cannot show how it arrived at the percentage of each person's year that was spent on it. The number was produced in June, from memory, for a period that ended in December. It may well be accurate. It is not evidence.

The CRA does not require a timekeeping system, and it does not require software. It requires that the numbers in the claim can be traced to something recorded while the work was happening. That is the entire standard, and it is met by about fifteen minutes a week.

What is in the workbook

The five columns that do the work

• Activity type Seven options, six of them directly engaged in SR&ED and one for everything else. Under the proxy method only directly engaged time enters the salary base, so the non-SR&ED line is as important as the others. Log it, or the 90% test cannot be calculated.
• Hours Actual hours, not percentages. Percentages are what you produce at the end from hours you recorded at the time. Doing it the other way round is exactly the habit this sheet is meant to break.
• What was attempted One sentence. “Three stabiliser blends at 0.4, 0.8 and 1.2% held at 40 C.” This is what turns a row of hours into a description of systematic investigation.
• What happened, or what it showed One sentence, and record the failures. A trial that did not work is direct evidence of technological uncertainty and is worth more to the claim than a trial that succeeded on the first attempt.
• Evidence reference The ticket, the commit, the batch number, the notebook page. This single column is the difference between a spreadsheet and a record, because it points at something created independently of the claim.

How to actually make it happen

The sheet is easy. The habit is the hard part, and it fails in predictable ways.

Pick a fixed time. Friday afternoon, before anything else closes out. A recurring fifteen-minute calendar block for the technical team costs nothing and is the single change that makes the difference.

One person owns it. Not everyone. One technical lead who collects the rows and enters them, asking two questions of each person: what did you try, and what happened.

Do not backfill more than a week. A log filled in monthly is a reconstruction with better handwriting. If a week is missed, note that it was missed rather than inventing it.

Keep the non-SR&ED hours in. The instinct is to log only the eligible work. That makes every technical person look like they spent 100% of the year on SR&ED, which is both untrue and one of the fastest ways to attract attention.

What the sheet does not do

It does not decide eligibility. It records hours and evidence against projects; whether those projects meet the CRA's two requirements is a separate judgment, made against the facts and the current guidance.

It does not calculate a claim. There is no expenditure pool, no proxy calculation, and no credit estimate in it, deliberately. Those depend on payroll data, corporate structure, provincial rate, and assistance received, none of which belong in a sheet passed around a technical team.

It does not replace your existing systems. If your developers already log against tickets and your production team already keeps batch records, those are better evidence than any spreadsheet, because they were created for another purpose. In that case use this sheet only for the allocation layer on top, and put the ticket or batch reference in the evidence column.

One year from now

The difference between a company that fills this in and one that does not shows up at exactly two moments. The first is at filing, when the technical narrative can be written from a record of what was actually tried rather than from a meeting where people try to remember. The second is on review, when the reviewer asks how the percentages were arrived at, and the answer is a file rather than an explanation.

Neither moment is dramatic. Both are worth considerably more than fifteen minutes a week.

General information current at the date of writing, not advice on a specific claim. Program rules, forms, and administrative practice change; we confirm the current position for every file.

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