CIR tax credit: keep your records as you go

The crédit d'impôt recherche, or CIR, is a French research tax credit that funds part of companies' research spending. Companies claim it on their own declaration. Supporting documents are requested later, sometimes several years afterward, during a tax audit or a scientific review.

That is where the difficulty arises. The work is over, the teams have changed, and you need to demonstrate what was done, by whom and when.

What a supporting file contains

A CIR supporting file generally has two parts.

The scientific and technical part describes the work. It sets out the state of knowledge at the start of the project, the scientific or technical difficulties to overcome, the approach followed, the experiments carried out and the results obtained, including failures.

The financial part justifies the spending. In particular, it details the time spent by researchers and technicians on each project, and the other eligible costs.

The two parts must match. The time declared must correspond to real work, and the work described must leave traces.

Why reconstructing afterward is fragile

In many companies, the file is written after the financial year has closed. Meeting notes, emails, result files and the teams' memories are gathered at that point.

This reconstruction raises two problems. First: some documents are missing, because nobody thought to keep them. Second: the documents gathered carry dates that are hard to establish. A file may have been changed, a meeting note written months later. For an auditor or an expert, a document produced during the work is far more convincing than a reconstructed one.

Good habits during the year

Timestamp the intermediate deliverables. Technical notes, test results, prototype versions, progress reports: each shows the real progress of the work at the time it was produced.

Document the failures. A test that does not work proves that there was a difficulty to overcome. It is often the most useful element in the file, and the first to disappear.

Link the work to the people. Noting who produced what makes it easier to justify the time spent by each contributor.

File by project and by year. On the day of the audit, quickly finding the documents for a given project saves you hours.

For CIR consulting firms

Firms that help their clients prepare their CIR claims know these difficulties well. Recommending that these clients timestamp their deliverables throughout the year strengthens the files the firm later defends. The writing work then rests on reliable documents rather than on a reconstruction.

With Ipocamp, in practice

Ipocamp lets you timestamp each deliverable when it is produced. You deposit the file and receive a certificate showing its date and its fingerprint. The file fingerprint is a unique string of characters computed from the file's content, which lets you verify later that it has not been changed.

Deposits are organized by project, and the API can automatically timestamp the files produced by your tools. For firms, we offer a dedicated plan that lets you follow each client's deposits.

This article is for informational purposes only and constitutes neither legal nor tax advice. An Ipocamp certificate strengthens a supporting file. Whether the work is eligible is for the tax authorities to assess.

To go further: our offer for research tax credit firms.