Build Your Own R&D Tax Credit AI Agent

The problem the agent addresses

The federal research credit rewards businesses that spend money on developing new or improved products, processes or software. Many businesses that qualify never claim it, or claim less than they could, for a simple reason: the work of proving it is heavy. A claim has to show what the work was, why it involved technical uncertainty, who did it, how much of their time it took and what it cost. When that information is reconstructed months later, from memory and old tickets, it is slow to assemble and easy to challenge.

The agent is built around the opposite habit. Instead of reconstructing the story at year end, it collects the evidence as the work happens, from the tools your team already uses, and keeps it organized by project. When the time comes to prepare a claim, the material is already there.

Who it is for

The agent suits businesses that build or improve something technical and want their evidence in order, such as software companies, engineering and manufacturing firms, and product teams inside larger organizations. It also suits CPA and advisory firms that want a repeatable way to gather evidence from clients. It is less suited to a business with little technical activity, where the four-part test is unlikely to be met, and we would rather say so early than sell you a tool you will not use.

What it does not do

It does not decide eligibility, give tax advice, file returns or guarantee a credit. Whether an activity qualifies depends on the facts and on the tax rules, which professionals interpret. The agent organizes evidence and drafts documents. Forms are filed through an authorized IRS e-file provider or tax software, not by Cost Guru, and any claim should be reviewed by a licensed CPA or enrolled agent. A well-documented claim can still be questioned, because the tax authorities decide whether a claim is accepted.

A worked example (illustrative)

This is an invented scenario, not a client result, and the numbers are made up. A software company with eight developers works on a new scheduling engine during the year. Today the finance lead reconstructs the story each January from the project tracker and a few emails. With the agent, each sprint's tickets and commits are linked to the scheduling-engine project as they happen, and developers add a two-line note when they hit a technical problem and how they tried to solve it.

At year end the agent shows each developer's time allocation across projects, drawn from the time they logged, and lists wages for the share spent on the scheduling engine. It marks two tickets as likely routine maintenance rather than research, with reasons, and flags one as needing review because the note is thin. The reviewer checks the flagged items, accepts or changes the tags and works from a claim pack in which the evidence, the costs and the calculation sit side by side. The reviewer still has to exercise judgment, but is not starting from a blank page.

Connecting your systems

The agent works with accounting and payroll systems such as Xero and QuickBooks, and with work tools such as Jira and GitHub. Each connection is confirmed for your setup before you rely on it, and access is limited to what the work needs. Our integrations pages describe what can sync, and they are proposals until confirmed.

White-label from Swanson Reed

Firms that want a ready-made route can offer TaxTrex, for R&D documentation, and creditARMOR, for audit readiness. Both are Swanson Reed products, available white-label. Terms, review tiers and partner pricing are proposals until confirmed by Swanson Reed. The mock audit in creditARMOR does not guarantee acceptance of a claim or predict whether it will be examined.