An R&D project is the broader business activity you are undertaking to achieve your commercial goal. Projects often include developing, improving, or enhancing a new product, service, material, or device.

Your project may be made up of a range of business activities including eligible R&D activities that you can register for the R&D tax incentive.

There are two types of eligible R&D activities within a project: core and supporting activities. However, projects can also include other business-as-usual activities which are not eligible for the R&D tax incentive.

Projects take the format:

1.0 Project

1.1 Core Activity

1.1.1 Supporting Activity.

You should not aim to describe your eligible R&D activities within your project (leave that for later), but rather your border purpose, goals, and objectives.

Projects can be created from two places in Synnch, the Client Profile>Projects Tab:

or the Project Profile>Project Tab:

To create your project, complete all fields within the new project form:

1. Choose a Project Name

Your project name does not have to be scientific or research-oriented, it should simply describe your project. Perhaps your new product, service or application already has a name or working title, if so, use this. If you have lots of projects, we recommend developing naming conventions to help you search and identify them in Synnch. You can change your project name in Synnch at any time.

2. Define a Date Range

Your project can have any date range you wish and span multiple financial years. It’s recommended to define a date range that reflects your commercial timeline for achieving your project goal, such as the commercialisation of a new product.

3. Discuss your Project Objectives

Your project objectives should describe what you set out to achieve through undertaking your project, and how you plan to do it. You can describe the broader purpose of your R&D activities here but save the detail for your core activities. Describe your new product, service, material, or device in detail, and discuss your plans, goals, and objectives for developing it.

4. Set your Lodgement Date

Set a lodgement date for your project, after July 1st in the current financial year. This date is used to trigger automated milestones in Synnch and is shared with your linked R&D Consultant if you have one.

5. Choose your Reporting Frequency

Set your reporting frequency, and Synnch will send automated recordkeeping reminders to the project owner and collaborators at the selected frequency, to keep your team on track.

6. Set a Total Project Budget & Currency

Your total project budget should be an estimate of the total investment you plan to spend on your project for the current financial year. This should not be confused with your eligible expenditure, but rather the total estimated value of all project expenditures including your R&D spend.

7. Upload any Supporting documents or Links

You can upload any relevant supporting documents or other files that may help evidence your project objectives and goals. Common evidence types include project plans, project scopes, product road maps and so on.

You can also add links to evidence in other web applications, such as shared directories (OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox etc), project boards (Monday, Jira, Trello, Asano, Azure DevOps etc) or any other relevant link or URL.

The more evidence you can upload to substantiate your projects the better!

Need more help?

You can purchase a detailed Project Scoping Workshop here.

Or, watch our video on R&D projects, and how to create them.