By switching to Boast from a Big 4 R&D tax credit claim solution, CoLab turned a 150-hourplus commitment involving 12+ team members into a seamless, audit-free experience involving a single point of contact and a handful of 30-minute check ins.
About CoLab
Gathering feedback—and having an avenue to action on it—is a challenge across all industries. But when it comes to actually manufacturing and designing new hardware products, if you don’t give stakeholders a chance to provide design feedback — or worse, if you let their feedback slip through the cracks—design quality suffers.
Missing the mark at the design phase because feedback isn’t vetted or applied can have disastrous downstream implications, locking in bad decisions that hurt product quality, gross margins, and customer trust.
Preventing these catastrophes (and helping design teams create the strongest products possible) is at the heart of CoLab.
Theirs is a cloud-based platform purpose built for fast, effective design review, enabling multiple engineers, designers, and other stakeholders to review designs together and build off one another’s feedback.
Their solutions make it easy for anyone to review computer-aided design (CAD) models, while automating issue tracking so that engineering teams can design better products faster.
While traditionally, design reviews may be 80 percent non-value added work and 20 percent real problem solving, for hardware teams using CoLab, it’s the other way around. CoLab enables these teams to document issues asynchronously, then use their meetings to solve tough technical problems—not waste time in review.
A SaaS product in search of a SaaS solution
Patrick Leckey, CoLab’s VP Engineering, has been a technologist in Canada’s innovation space for years, and was familiar with the funding landscape surrounding the kind of R&D that fuels CoLab’s market differentiation from the start. “I have been working with SR&ED for a long time—pretty much since SR&ED existed,” Patrick explains, as he’s been involved in several successful Ottawa-based startups since his career began.
While the promise of SR&ED was familiar to Patrick, the process of claiming SR&ED for CoLab and previous startups he’d worked for rarely panned out as planned.
That’s because Patrick and his team worked with one of the traditional big-name accounting providers to tackle their SR&ED claims, and found the amount of time and effort his teams were responsible for putting into the claim process were almost never worth the payout.
And even after syncing more than 100 hours into the process, his team got audited, adding another 10-to-15 hours of internal preparation for the audit calls to the process, while calling for Patrick’s actual developer team to join him on the audit calls with the CRA.
“Overall, I’d say we were in the area of 150, maybe getting close to 200 hours total with that previous partner,” Patrick notes—and this was for just a single SR&ED claim.
None of this sat well with Patrick or the rest of the CoLab team. After all, the genesis of CoLab—and much of the work Patrick has done across his career—was reinventing processes that hadn’t been touched in decades.
Reinventing the SR&ED claim process with Boast
With so much time sunk on compiling—then defending—a claim with a traditional accounting house, Patrick and his team went looking for a new SR&ED provider that shared their own teams’ innovative ethos.
“We wanted to see if there were other people that had a new way of doing things. The genesis of CoLab was reinventing a process that hadn’t been touched in decades, and so we thought ‘maybe somebody’s doing the same thing in the SR&ED space,’” Patrick explains
“We came across Boast and it’s like, ‘Oh, it seems like our people!’ They’re trying to do the same thing—they’re taking a stuffy old process that has a lot of manual work and making it something that isn’t horrible,” Patrick says of the discovery process.
Switching to Boast, rather than having to pull in a team of a dozen developers, Patrick brought at most one or two developers for interviews that lasted “30 minutes max, and that was it!”
“And in two straight submissions with Boast, we’ve never been audited or had to put time toward defending our claim,” Patrick confirms.
“I think we’ve been able to not only gain back time, but our claims have been more successful in terms of dollar amounts as well, which for a high-growth company at our stage, any additional capital that we can save or bring in is hugely beneficial to our innovation. It means we can hire more people, it means we can work on more projects, and it means we can get cooler stuff out to our customers faster,” Patrick notes.
Before working with Boast?
Hours claiming SR&ED
Stakeholders
Unsuccessful Audits
The value BOAST delivered
Hours Saved
Point of contact
Larger Claim Size
More money for more innovation
What has this SR&ED funding gone toward?
As Patrick puts it, some of the most important features of CoLabs platform were born directly out of the SR&ED funding that they captured working with Boast.
This includes the implementation of Follow Mode on the CoLab platform, which allows teams to troubleshoot in realtime on CAD projects in high-fidelity, across teams—and even out in the field.
SR&ED funding also helped power CoLab’s Review Notebooks, which enable the asynchronous collaboration that many are familiar with on Google Docs, but—until now—couldn’t effectively harness in a collaborative design review environment
Technologists speaking the same language of innovation
When Patrick was exploring SR&ED options, one of the key things that set Boast apart was the fact that our team understood his tech so intimately— because Boast is a team of technologists in our own right.
“It’s like: We are building a SaaS solution, they’re building a SaaS solution, they know our space better than any of these other providers, so they’re going to be easier to work with and they’re going to understand the same problems we’re having.”
Our in-house tech and tax experts—who are enabled by our AI-driven tech platform—are key to what makes our team more efficient and effective than any other R&D tax credit provider. From saving teams time in the leadup by seamlessly integrating financial, payroll and workflow data into a single platform of R&D intelligence, our team can work smarter and harder to uncover every possible funding opportunity for our customers.
“I think what separated Boast from most of the other [SR&ED providers] is it wasn’t just that they were super engaged, it’s that they actually seem to understand the technology side of it right from that first call,” Patrick notes. “It’s probably because you’re also building a SaaS application—and a high technology solution to this problem—so there’s just a lot more of that technological thinking and technology knowledge within the company.”
To learn more about how Boast can speak your language of innovation and maximize your access to non-dilutive innovation capital, talk to an expert from our team today.
