SEE THE NUMBERS

ROI, compliance estimate, and a real sample pack.

Three ways to see what an accurate ledger is worth — in your own numbers.

The compliance pack, as a byproduct.

Once the ledger is real, the R&D credit lifts because the substantiation holds up. Drag the sliders to see what a comparable claim could look like.

Engineers in R&D roles 80
Avg fully-loaded cost / engineer $210K
% time on qualifying R&D 70%
Primary state / region for R&D work
ESTIMATED RECOVERABLE CREDIT · YEAR 1
Qualifying R&D spend
Federal credit (~8% typical)
Regional credit (California)
Per engineer / year
Estimate only. Actual credit depends on your qualifying-research review and how each activity gets substantiated. Regional rates reflect typical effective rates published in 2024–2025 industry surveys and assume a multi-year claimer with a normal base period. This isn't tax advice — Tymr produces the per-worker source-event evidence your accountant or tax firm needs to defend the credit.

Where the numbers come from

Federal: we model the Alternative Simplified Credit (ASC) — 14% of qualifying spend above 50% of the prior-three-year average, which lands around 7–10% for a typical software org. We default to 8%. Regional rates come from published 2024–2025 R&D credit surveys (BDO, EY, Deloitte, KBKG) and represent typical effective rates for a software company claiming for 3+ years. Canada SR&ED is shown as the federal 15% basic rate.

Qualifying spend = wages for employees performing qualified research, supplies consumed in R&D, 65% of contract research, and certain capitalized software-development costs. Management and back-office time generally doesn't qualify.

Why substantiation matters more than the math

The math is the easy part. The hard part — why most organizations under-claim — is substantiation: contemporaneous evidence tied to specific projects and workers. That's what falls out of the Tymr ledger: every hour traces back to a Jira ticket, a PR, a calendar block, an incident, or an agent run. See the compliance view →

The switch math. What an accurate ledger saves you in year one.

Recovered hours, admin time saved, allocation accuracy, productivity lift. Drag the sliders for your team.

Total team size 100
Avg fully-loaded cost / person $160K
Hours/week per person on timesheet admin 2.5h
% of time currently lost / unaccounted 12%
Avg billable hourly rate (if billable) $180
Your shop
ESTIMATED ANNUAL NET ROI · YEAR 1
Recovered hours value
Admin time saved
Productivity gain (~5%)
Better resource allocation
Annual gross benefit
Tymr cost (Professional, $14/seat/mo)
3-year cumulative net
Methodology. Industry-validated benchmarks: auto-tracking recovers ~50% of currently-lost hours; manual entry consumes 1–3 hrs/week per user; accurate allocation visibility yields 4–7% productivity gains; resource-allocation accuracy improves throughput 2–4%. Calculations assume 50 working weeks and 2,080 hours/year. Results are estimates — your actual ROI depends on team mix, current process maturity, and integration coverage.

Where the ROI comes from

Manual time tracking leaks in three places. An accurate ledger seals each one.

Captured hours

Every calendar event, ticket move, commit, incident, and agent run becomes an event — recovering roughly half the hours timesheets miss. For billable practices, recovered hours convert at full rate.

Admin time

Auto-drafting eliminates 1–3 hours per week per worker of timesheet entry. Compounded across the team, that's a full FTE recovered per ~25 workers.

Allocation accuracy

Real per-worker, per-project hours show where effort actually went. Managers and PMOs use the data to rebalance — typical productivity lift is 4–7%.

The sample pack. Anonymized, but real.

Ten slides from a representative software company — the same structure your tax firm receives. Names scrubbed, dollars rounded; the methodology is real.

Anonymized · 120-person software company · Q1 2026
Email me a PDF copy
Slide 01 Cover — Q1 2026 audit pack Anonymized sample

R&D + Balance-Sheet Audit Pack — Q1 2026

Prepared for: [Client Software Co.] · 120 engineers

Prepared with: [R&D Tax Firm] — your firm's methodology, Tymr's time evidence.

PeriodQ1 2026
Engineers120
SourcesJira · GH · GCal
SurveysZero
Slide 02 $1.84M tax-credit lift — executive summary CFO-ready

$1.84M tax-credit lift. $4.9M for the balance sheet.

  • Qualifying wages: $14.2M (of $18.4M total engineering compensation, 77% qualifying ratio)
  • Federal R&D credit (8% effective): $1.14M — up from $820K claimed in 2025 on comparable headcount.
  • Regional credit (7.5% effective): $702K
  • Lift vs. prior year: +$1.02M combined, driven by contemporaneous substantiation of work previously haircut.
  • Capitalized software development: $4.9M across 11 major projects; routine maintenance $2.1M cleanly separated.
Confidence: 94% of engineer-hours in Q1 had at least one source event (Jira, GitHub, or calendar). Remaining 6% reviewed manually and excluded from the claim.
Slide 03 Per-engineer hours, cited to source events Top 20 · anonymized

Real time, captured as it happened. Cited to source events.

EngineerRoleR&D hrsCap. hrsMaint. hrsEvidenceQualifying $
E-0142Platform Lead342.154.018.6Jira+GH+GCal$142,108
E-0217Sr. Backend318.862.422.1Jira+GH$128,442
E-0089Staff Eng304.688.212.7Jira+GH+GCal$148,876
E-0301Sr. Frontend298.434.928.8Jira+GH$112,204
E-0158ML Eng340.712.19.4Jira+GH+GCal$154,322
E-0044Infra / DevOps68.438.2248.1Jira+PagerDuty$31,120
+ 14 more

Every row in the full pack cites specific Jira tickets and GitHub PRs — redacted in this sample.

Slide 04 Classification mix — 77% qualifies Q1 2026 hours

77% of engineering time qualifies. 23% capitalizes or runs as expense.

R&D qualifying · 77% Capitalized · 14% Maintenance / expense · 9%

Why this matters: tax preparers typically haircut aggressive R&D claims 20–40% when substantiation is thin. Tymr's classification is contemporaneous and cited, so the haircut disappears.

Slide 05 Project-level breakdown 11 active projects

Project mix — what qualified, what capitalized, what didn't.

ProjectHoursR&DCap.Maint.Qualifying $
PROJ-142 Auth-v2 rebuild2,10898%2%0%$704K
PROJ-091 Billing migration1,82241%54%5%$248K
PROJ-203 ML ranking engine1,60494%4%2%$520K
PROJ-188 Data warehouse rework1,21862%31%7%$258K
INFRA-014 Kubernetes upgrade98818%12%70%$61K
PROJ-221 Observability platform74288%8%4%$218K
… + 5 more projects4,101$1.24M
Slide 06 Capitalize vs expense — monthly Journal-ready

Capitalizable software development — ready for amortization schedules.

MonthCap. hoursExpense hoursCapitalized $Journal entry
2026-011,428312$1.62MDR Capitalized SW / CR Wages
2026-021,516288$1.71MDR Capitalized SW / CR Wages
2026-031,412334$1.60MDR Capitalized SW / CR Wages
Q1 total4,356934$4.93M$4,934,208

Split logic: Pre-feasibility research and post-launch bug fixes → expense. Application development between feasibility and go-live → capitalize.

Slide 07 Workpaper CSV preview Column schema

The CSV your accountant pastes straight into the workpaper.

engineer_id, engineer_name, project, period, hours, classification, evidence_type, evidence_ref, confidence
E0142, K. Ellison, PROJ-142 Auth-v2, 2026-01, 118.4, R&D qualifying, jira+github, JIRA:PROJ-142;GH:pr/482, 0.96
E0142, K. Ellison, PROJ-091 Billing, 2026-01, 22.1, Capitalized, jira+github, JIRA:PROJ-091;GH:pr/471, 0.92
E0217, S. Amir, INFRA-014 K8s upgrade, 2026-01, 94.1, Maintenance, jira+pagerduty, JIRA:INFRA-014;PD:inc/2210, 0.88
E0089, J. Liu, PROJ-203 ML ranking, 2026-01, 142.6, R&D qualifying, jira+github+gcal, JIRA:PROJ-203;GH:pr/501;CAL:design-review-0302, 0.97
E0301, N. Park, PROJ-188 DW rework, 2026-01, 98.3, Capitalized, jira+github, JIRA:PROJ-188;GH:pr/492, 0.93

Column names match the template every R&D boutique we've worked with already uses. No renames, no re-mapping.

Slide 08 Source-event lineage One engineer, one day

Every hour cites a source event. Not a memory test.

Sample lineage for engineer E-0142 on 2026-01-14. Each Jira transition, GitHub commit, and calendar block generates a time event — classified against the four-part test.

TimeEventSourceProjectClassification
09:12Jira: In Progress → In Reviewjira://PROJ-142-441Auth-v2R&D
09:48GitHub: commit a93f1d2gh://repo/commit/a93f1d2Auth-v2R&D
10:30Calendar: Design review (60m)gcal://evt/14x82pAuth-v2R&D
13:14GitHub: PR #482 openedgh://repo/pull/482Auth-v2R&D
15:02Jira: comment on INFRA-019jira://INFRA-019-c/887InfraMaint.
16:40GitHub: commit 4f22abcgh://repo/commit/4f22abcBillingCapitalize
Slide 09 Methodology — how the sorting works Plain English

How we got from source events to qualifying hours.

  • Data sources. Event-level ingest from Jira (status transitions, comments, worklogs), GitHub (commits, PRs, reviews), Google & Microsoft Calendar (meeting blocks with engineering attendees).
  • Attribution. Each event attributes time to (a) the engineer who generated it and (b) the project inferred from Jira/GitHub metadata. Overlapping events deduplicated per the "primary activity" rule.
  • Qualifying classification. Four-part test applied per activity bucket: permitted purpose, technological in nature, elimination of uncertainty, process of experimentation. Rules library is auditable; tags are reviewable and overridable.
  • Capitalize vs expense. Application-development stage separated from preliminary project stage and post-implementation stage using commit/PR lifecycle signals.
  • Human review. Controller reviews low-confidence (<0.85) classifications weekly, about thirty minutes. No engineer survey.
Full methodology PDF ships with every report. Two pages. Designed for a tax partner to defend in an audit.
Slide 10 Next step — your pack, your numbers From kickoff to handoff

Your pack. Your numbers. The same set of files.

  • OAuth into Jira, GitHub, and your calendar.
  • Continuous classification runs through the period. Your controller reviews ~30 min/week.
  • Pack delivered and walked through with your tax firm on the call.