SR&ED Software vs. Consultant: What Canadian Founders Should Know

Most Canadian companies with SR&ED claims face the same choice: hire a traditional consultant who takes a percentage of your refund, or prepare the claim yourself with structured software. Neither is always right. Here’s an honest comparison across the dimensions that actually matter.

Pricing

The structural difference is percentage vs. flat fee. Traditional SR&ED consultants work on contingency — typically 15–30% of the credit they recover. On a $150,000 refund, that’s $22,500–$45,000 in fees taken before you see any money. The contingency model makes the cost feel invisible, but it isn’t.

sredy.io charges $299 flat for the Self-Serve package. White Glove is custom-priced after a brief review of your situation. No contingency, no percentage of your refund.

The gap compounds over time. If you have a $100,000 federal credit annually, a 20% contingency is $20,000 per year — $100,000 over five years of claims. The flat fee for the same five years is $1,495.

Preparation workflow

With a consultant, you provide raw information — payroll records, project descriptions, employee activities — and the consultant conducts intake interviews, writes the T661 narratives on your behalf, and delivers a package for your accountant. You are largely passive in the process.

With software, you answer structured questions modelled on CRA’s own eligibility criteria — the same areas a reviewer would probe during an audit. The platform generates T661-aligned narratives from your answers. You are active in the process, which means you understand the claim you are signing.

Documentation quality

A consultant writes narratives based on interviews with your team. Quality depends heavily on the individual consultant and how deeply they understand your technical work. Strong consultants produce clear, defensible narratives. Weaker ones produce generic language that doesn’t hold up under CRA scrutiny — and you may not know the difference until a review.

With software, you describe your own technical problems in your own words, with the platform guiding you to address CRA’s three requirements: technological uncertainty, systematic investigation, and technological advancement. Technical founders who can explain what they were trying to solve often produce stronger narratives than a consultant working from an interview summary.

Either way, the quality of your underlying documentation — git history, lab notebooks, project management records — determines how defensible the claim is at review. Neither preparation path compensates for weak contemporaneous records.

Founder and team time

Consultant engagements typically require 3–8 hours of your time across intake interviews, document gathering, and review cycles. Timelines vary: some firms deliver packages in weeks, others have long queues that can affect your filing deadline.

Self-serve software is self-paced. Most founders complete the core claim interview in 2–4 hours. The platform exports a structured package you can hand to your accountant without an extended review cycle. There’s no consultant availability or scheduling dependency.

Accountant handoff

Both paths end with your accountant. The T661 and Schedule 31 are filed with your T2 corporate return — that’s always the accountant’s job, not the consultant’s and not the software’s.

What your accountant receives differs. Consultant output varies in format and completeness. sredy.io produces T661-aligned narratives, financial schedules for salaries and contractors, an evidence index summarizing your supporting documentation, and a CRA readiness assessment. The package is structured to minimize review time for your accountant. You can view a sample output package to see exactly what’s included.

CRA review readiness

CRA selects a significant portion of SR&ED claims for detailed review each year. In a review, you need contemporaneous evidence — records created during the R&D work, not reconstructed afterward. Narratives alone do not carry a review.

Both preparation approaches produce written narratives. The difference is in the supporting documentation guidance. sredy.io includes an evidence index that identifies what records you should retain and how they support each claimed project. Consulting firms vary substantially in how much documentation coaching they provide; some assume you already have adequate records and don’t audit that assumption.

When a consultant still makes sense

Software preparation isn’t right for every situation. There are cases where working with a specialist is the sensible choice:

• Very large claims — eligible expenditures over $1M where the financial stakes of a CRA adjustment are high
• Claims already under CRA review or dispute, where specialist representation is valuable
• First-time claimants with complex multi-project portfolios spanning several technical disciplines
• Industries with highly nuanced eligibility, such as pharmaceutical or clinical-stage biotech, where SR&ED eligibility boundaries are contested
• Companies where no one internal has the technical fluency to describe their R&D work accurately in writing

For most Canadian software, SaaS, medtech, and engineering companies with documented technical work and claims under $500K in eligible expenditures, structured software preparation is sufficient — and meaningfully cheaper.