Detox your business with R&D tax credits

Hands up who, every year, enthusiastically swears to stick to a more healthier lifestyle, only to revert to Friday morning bacon rolls, a week later? Come on, we know its not just us!

Why not set yourself up for detox success, by instead putting all your energies into giving your business a health boost? R&D tax credits could be the perfect detoxing agent and following these tips could make your company (and yourself!) financially healthier:

1. Detox your habits. Time to take a closer look at your day-to-day activities! Could you be carrying out R&D without realising it? Are you pushing the boundaries and thinking outside the box? Pouring money into trying new things to improve your products and services? Sometimes failing? 

If you can answer yes to any of these questions then you may be doing R&D. Which means that you could be eligible for R&D tax credits, giving your company a nice healthy financial boost.

2. Embrace the art of decluttering. How? By keeping track of staff time. Knowing what your staff are spending their time on is, of course, just good business sense. However, when it comes to R&D tax credits, its more important than ever to keep track the biggest cost in the majority of claims is that of staff and having an accurate record of what every member of staff has worked on in a year will help make sure you maximise your claim. 

Setting up a tracking system could be the decluttering action that your business needs.

3. Some is good, more is better. After your R&D tax credit claim has gone in, resulting in a nice financial boost for your company, make sure you reinvest in more innovation! Now is the time to flush out those stagnant old methods and look at reinvesting in more R&D and innovation, thus creating a never-ending loop of financial rewards for your business.

4. Keep going. Don't make claiming for R&D tax credits just another failed resolution. Turn it into a habit that you keep up with year on year, continually claiming and reinvesting.

5. Don't go it alone. It's always easier to keep New Year resolutions with support, so let Hulton Associates be your detox support group! Contact Mark Lear on 07967 462704. We can help!

Antibiotic Resistance: A Return to the Medical Dark Ages ?

What images spring to mind when you consider healthcare in the middle ages? A world of pestilence and plague? Where illnesses were treated with superstition and old wives tales, rather than antibiotics and clinically proven drugs? Recently, Prime Minister David Cameron has stated that we could soon be “cast back into the dark ages of medicine” as a result of the increasing threat of antibiotic resistance. 

Can you comprehend a world without antibiotics? Back in the middle ages rates of mortality were high from illnesses readily treatable in today’s world with a dose of antibiotics. Even something as simple as a cut finger could end in an untimely death.

Antibiotics are medicines that inhibit growth or kill microorganisms that can cause all sorts of nasty infections and diseases. In 1928 Ayrshire born Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin: this marked the start of modern antibiotics. Healthcare was revolutionised: less women died from infections following child birth; soldiers injured in warfare were less likely to die from infection; life threatening diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia and sexually transmitted diseases could be managed by antibiotics.

However, this miracle cure soon resulted in the widespread overuse and misuse of antibiotics, which lead to a far more alarming problem, which is now a major threat to public health: antibiotic resistance. In layman’s terms, this is when bacteria no longer respond to antibiotics. Bacteria are pretty crafty, failure to complete a course of antibiotics may leave a few tougher bacteria to survive and multiply; in other cases bacteria undergo genetic mutations which makes the drug non-longer effective.

Lots of diseases that we thought we had mastered are now on the rise, only this time a little bit more scary. Meticillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a type of bacterial infection resistant to many widely used antibiotics. It is increasingly prevalent in hospitals: without antibiotics major surgical procedures as knee replacements, organ transplants to complications in childbirth would carry a greater risk.

We all know from reading Victorian fiction that a cough is never just a cough… Tuberculosis was the killer of many, rich or poor. In 1815 it claimed the lives of one in four in England. Improvements in public health and the development of the antibiotic Streptomycin in 1946 made it possible to treat and cure TB. That is, until now. Since the 1980's there has been a resurgence of tuberculosis due to the rise in multi-drug-resistant TB.

But before you get frightened by the thought of an untimely paper cut bring about your demise, let’s consider the cutting edge science that is being carried out by lots of clever people. Researchers all over the world are developing new technology and innovations including: genetically modifying current antibiotics; developing drugs to target the bacteria’s protective cell wall; and targeting the mechanisms by which bacteria form biofilms, a critical phenomenon which protects the interior cells in the film from antibiotic attack.

Antibiotic resistance is a global concern: this week The White House unveiled a new plan to accelerate the research and development of new antibiotics by 2020 and introduce tighter regulations on the use of current drugs. With a global effort to control the increase in antibiotic resistance instead of being “cast back into the dark ages of medicine”, we’ll be propelled to the future where once a disease is tackled it stays that way.

Image Credits: Dr Graham Beards

By Louise Tibbets

Top of the Class for Jumpstart Academy

Jumpstart, the award-winning Scottish-based UK research and development (R&D) tax relief specialist, has revolutionised its training, client service and professional development capability with its industry-leading Jumpstart Academy.

The Academy, which is open to all of Jumpstart's staff and sales associates, has reduced the time it takes to bring its technical analysts fully up to speed with legislative complexities from 12 months to three.

The new concept in knowledge dissemination has also created an unparalleled consistency and quality among the technical analysts, most of whom are educated to PhD level.

Jumpstart director Richard Edwards, who has been mainly responsible for creating the Academy and defining the content of its courses, said: "We have created a central repository of knowledge that ensures we apply our specialist knowledge in a highly consistent way. This means that our clients experience the same level of service and knowledge irrespective of which of our staff they speak to."

The Edinburgh-based company, has successfully submitted over 2100 R&D tax relief claims since 2008 and has recovered £43 million for its customers. Nearly two thirds of its clients are in Scotland, but it is now expanding into the rest of the UK, with similarly exciting results.

Mr Edwards said: "As a knowledge-based business, it is really important for us to have consistency in the best available information and share that with our staff.

"The Academy arose from the fact that we were hiring technical analysts and training them in a very intensive, one-to-one process. This could take about 12 months during which time they sometimes developed inconsistent ideas about how to interpret or apply what can be a quite subjective piece of guidance to the legislation.

"As we grew quickly, consistency became a significant issue and the Academy was designed to ensure that people had the right knowledge in a scaleable way. They can now go through all the modules relevant to their particular job or role within three months, though they can take the courses at their own pace."

Mr Edwards developed the first tranche of content but company staff can now introduce modules which, when checked by Quality Assurance, can be entered into the Academy for sharing with everyone else.

He said: "The Academy lets us do much faster testing, with multiple choice assessments giving people an instant check on how fully they have registered the content. Prior to the establishment of the Academy, we had written exams, which were time-consuming to administrate."

The Academy concept is likened in Jumpstart to an onion, in which the inner core is the Finance Act which is the basis of the legislation and the next layer is the HMRC's Corporate Intangibles R&D manual, which is how the tax authorities interpret the Act. The outer layer is Jumpstart's content, which essentially is information for its staff on how to interpret HMRC's guidance to the legislation. 

"It makes us very flexible," said Mr Edwards. "For instance, if HMRC change their interpretation or their direction on a particular point, we can make the change to our training material, ensure everyone is re-certified and check who has done particular courses."

The Academy has been hugely successful in the sales process, since it demonstrates to clients how much effort the company has invested, and that its level of knowledge justifies the process.

Competitors, he said, continue to struggle both to find appropriate staff and train them quickly enough. The Academy at Jumpstart, in contrast, covers all roles from technical delivery, customer services, finance, quality to field sales.

The ethics and culture of the business are now being built into the Academy's core structures, though Mr Edwards said that at the moment it was a work in progress. 

"It has been very black and white so far in creating material relating to what we do," he said.   

"What we'd like to do is open up the Academy to make it more supportive of material relating to how we do things as well.

"That will start to cover softer aspects, such as how we engage with clients, how we define excellent customer service or sales techniques and tips. It can be much broader in scope."