How Eagle Advisory Partners turned thousands of scattered technical records into an audit-ready research credit study — while asking for less than eight hours of the client’s time.

The client is a software-development company that builds consumer-facing products serving the professional and amateur sports world. Its teams ship and continuously refine technically demanding software, working at the pace of a fast-moving product organization.

Like many high-velocity engineering teams, the company was performing serious, novel technical work every day — and capturing almost none of it in the form a tax authority would expect to see. It had never claimed the federal or state research credit.

• A first-time claimant with substantial qualifying activity buried inside code repositories, engineering chat, and contractor work — and no centralized R&D documentation.
• A hard statutory deadline driving the engagement, with a tax filing window that left no room to slip.
• A pass-through partnership structure with multiple owners and a mid-year equity change, complicating how the credit would ultimately be used.
• A lean leadership team with no spare capacity for a documentation-heavy, months-long process.

The brief was clear: capture every dollar of credit the company had legitimately earned, build it to withstand examination, and do it without grinding the founders’ calendars to a halt.

We ran the study end-to-end as a single, structured workflow — from raw evidence to the audit-ready deliverables — so the client never had to assemble, interpret, or organize their own technical history.

• Scoping and four-part-test framing. We mapped the company’s work into eight discrete technical projects within three separate development pillars; each were tested against the §41 four-part test for qualified research.
• Large-scale evidence ingestion. We pulled the company’s actual development record — code history, engineering discussion, financial systems, and contractor agreements — directly from source rather than relying on after-the-fact recollection.
• Targeted technical interviews. Short, focused conversations with the people doing the work confirmed allocations and surfaced the experimentation, dead ends, and uncertainty that define real research.
• Contemporaneous evidence index. Every qualifying activity was tied to dated, primary-source proof in a single master index — the backbone of an audit-defensible file.
• Financial modeling and credit calculation. We built the full ASC (14%) model — wages, contractor costs under the 65% rule, and supplies — with each line independently substantiated.

The hardest part of an R&D study is rarely the math — it is finding the signals inside an enormous, disparate operational record of raw data. We reviewed and reconciled the company’s massive technical footprint, then distilled it into one clean, defensible package.

Volume alone does not survive an audit — precision does. Every figure in the study traces to a primary source, and every claim is reconciled against the contemporaneous record.

• Each qualifying activity is anchored to dated evidence — specific commits, pull requests, messages, invoices, and agreements — not generalized narrative.
• Code history and quoted statements were verified against ground truth, with no reliance on paraphrase or reconstruction.
• Wages, contractor expenses, and supplies were substantiated line by line, with the §41(b)(3) 65% rule applied to qualifying contractor costs.
• Just as important, we documented what did not qualify — excluding non-qualifying wages, legal fees, commercial-use equipment, and reimbursed third-party hardware — so the claim reflects only defensible expense.

Total leadership time required: under eight hours.

We handled ingestion, reconciliation, interviewing, drafting, and modeling end-to-end. The client’s involvement was limited to providing the raw data, participating in six short stakeholder interviews and a handful of confirmations on judgment calls. There were no data-entry assignments, no documentation homework, and no months of back-and-forth — the founders stayed focused on building their business while the credit study ran in parallel.

Eagle Advisory Partners identified and substantiated more than $577,000 in qualified research expenses, supporting a combined federal and state research credit of more than $124,000 — captured for a company that had never claimed it before.

• More than $577,000 in qualified research expenses, fully documented.
• Approximately $77,500 in federal credit under the ASC method.
• Approximately $47,200 in state research credit.
• A complete, audit-defensible documentation package: project narratives, eight technical case studies, a contemporaneous evidence index, and a supporting financial model.

A great R&D study is not a one-time refund — it is the start of a repeatable advantage. We delivered the client more than a credit:

• We established a documentation framework the company can carry forward, making each future year’s study faster, cheaper, and stronger as its research scales.
• We gave leadership a clear understanding of the research credit as a recurring strategic asset — not a once-a-year scramble, but a permanent part of how they fund innovation.
• We handed the client’s CPA a filing-ready package — a clean Form 6765 instruction workbook and state-credit figures, a fully reconciled QRE model, and the audit-defensible substantiation behind every number — so they could complete the return on time and focus on what they do best.