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by hello_moto 5913 days ago
What constitutes R&D expenses if I may ask?

I used to work at a startup that makes no money at all. They asked me to sign some sort of "fake" stock options as part of the SR&ED requirements. Of course the numbers were meaningless (pennies or whatnot). So I'm very interested on how this works.
2 comments
henryprecheur 5913 days ago
I think this includes your salary/compensation. That's probably why they asked you to sign those stock options, so they could say "Hey look, we paid this guy $X for R&D. That's a tax credit of $Y."
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hello_moto 5912 days ago
I'm speechless, that's pretty darn good.

What if the startup is a one-man show, making money and start to pay himself? Sort of like owner-but-paid-annually? (Or maybe a one-man consultant).

So let me get this straight, let's say a startup has 4 employees and each employee got paid $50k annually. When the SR&ED is done correctly, the owner can get at least 50% back from the salary alone?

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chollida1 5913 days ago
For my company it's pretty much any expense related to an engineer. Salary, rent, power, computer, etc.
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hello_moto 5912 days ago
So to clarify: almost all expenses (hardware purchases included) will be reimbursed 50% by the BC?

Can rent be substituted as mortgage (say working on your own garage)?

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shawn13 5906 days ago
Basically, no. It is 50% of the loaded labor rate of all employees doing R&D activities on projects that your liaison agrees qualify as R&D. When you work out of your home, rent/mortgage on your home are specifically excluded as business expenses (by CRA), so they can't be included. Working out of an office, you get about 65% of salary back; out of a basement (my situation), it is basically 50% of salary.

Oh -- hardware purchases and the like don't count, and you have to be able to prove the salary was paid, so as far as I know there is no game to be played with stock options.

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chollida1 5902 days ago
> hardware purchases and the like don't count

Odd, we got to put the entire amount of the Tesla grid that we put together towards the SRED credits. Having said that I just filled out the paper work and handed it to the lawyers and accountants, perhaps they took it off afterwords?

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