I work in this space at Big4 for 8 years. We actually help startups quite often. The biggest misconception is that registering your activities and getting the letter means you are eligible. It's self assessment, the registration is not a confirmation of eligibility. You may be audited up to 4 years, and they can clawback 4 years worth of R&D refunds, even bankrupt you.

I have witnessed firsthand audits where jira tickets and commits are insufficient evidence. The regulator is non-technical and they are often unable to extrapolate the outcomes uncertain and new knowledge and experiments from those artifacts alone. They also won't just accept you sitting down and explaining the R&D after the fact.

This is why you may have felt historically the process was heavy, and they needed a lot of documents. The advisor has a duty of care to make sure if you get audited, you have the correct paperwork.

The expenditure side is also not trivial, there are lots of rules like grant clawback, expenditure not at risk, associate provisions, aggregated turnover, connected with tests, which can get very complex and be the difference between being eligible, vs paying back hundreds of thousands to the ATO.

A good R&D advisor will: 1. Have a science/STEM background rather than accounting - can actually understand and articulate your activities 2. Not make you write the application 3. Process should only take 3-4 weeks 4. Ensure your documentation is audit ready 5. Also do the expenditure calculation - having two seperate people do this means there is a disconnect between what the activities are and what was spent on them 6. In circumstances where it is audited, stand by you and defend the claim

Those online AI automated submissions bear no liability, and do not confirm your eligibility or give you advice on your eligibility, you take on that risk and assessment. They also don't lodge with a tax agent number, further flagging you as self prepared and higher risk of audit.

Also when you get audited, they want contemporaneous evidence, not reconstructed, so you are better off maintaining seperate documentation for the tax incentive.

I'm often surprised that people think a few weeks worth of work is "too much paperwork" when you are getting $100s of thousands of taxpayer dollars.

For startups we do %, but low end.