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Pilot R&D Tax Credit — Save your business up to $250k with the R&D tax credit
The R&D credit lets startups save a significant amount on payroll tax. But the credit is a huge pain to claim—until now. Pilot handles the full claims process for you, which means your business can potentially save up to $250k in tax.
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@eglyman It's an interesting question because there are a couple different axes we think about when we think about building software:
* The core execution of the work (i.e. "can we make software do parts of the work itself")
* The coordination of the work ("can we make software to help our *team* do this work more accurately, more efficiently, etc.")
* The customer experience (can we use software to make the signup process easy and painless)
A priori it's always a bit hard to know what the highest-impact areas of investment are going to be, so we generally like to start out by doing a given task entirely by hand (which is, after all, what literally any other provider in the space is going to do), and then use the information we learn from doing that to thoughtfully decide where the highest-impact area is for software to be involved.
Hello again Product Hunt 👋 ,
For those of you that don’t know, Pilot (which we launched on PH in Dec 2017) does bookkeeping and tax prep for startups📚📈. The idea is: you didn’t start your company to contend with this tedious, back-office stuff—but you need it to be done right. That’s where we come in: when you work with Pilot, you’re paired with a talented finance expert who takes care of this for you. And under the hood, we build software 👩💻that our team uses to make sure we’re doing a 💯job every time. Think of it as an Iron Man suit 🤖 for our finance team.
Basically, we take care of the important but boring stuff that you need to get right to keep your business healthy. And what’s more boring than tax credits? 😴Most tax credits aren’t worth the time for startups or small businesses, but there’s one interesting one that’s a big needle-mover 💹, and that’s the R&D tax credit. Companies that do R&D activities are eligible for the credit, and most startups engage in R&D activities under their definition 📖.
The problem is: claiming the credit is kind of a huge pain. There’s a bunch of tax paperwork and supporting documentation that you need to prepare, and most founders just throw their hands up and move on 💸.
That’s where we come in: we take all this work off your plate, and we only charge a very small amount relative to the size of the credit. So it’s basically like finding free money 💰. (And since we’re hopefully already doing your bookkeeping and tax prep, we know your business super-well, and this all lives under one nice, harmonious roof 🏦).
With the caveat that we can’t give you legal or tax advice, we’re very interested in your feedback, and we’ll be around all day answering questions!
This is fantastic. We have been using a traditional firm to do this for the past few years and have gotten a cumulative nearly $150k back in R&D tax credits over the last few years -- BUT we have paid nearly 3x the rate you are charging to do so, and had to deal with coordinating consultants, etc. The idea of having bookkeeping (already a Pilot customer), tax (a new Pilot customer) and now R&D tax credit under the same roof makes our lives easier and also saves a lot valuable cash.
Great product and value proposition! Are you looking to add new financial features and products?
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