The most common question asked by R&D Consultants new to Synnch is what role we play as the technology partner in engaging and supporting you, and your clients on the platform. Ultimately, this question is central to how we operate and is the most important part of any successful partnership.

We’ve put together this summary of our approach to supporting your clients in Synnch to provide an overview of our strategy and purpose. Should you require more information, please contact me directly and I would be happy to expand and explore tailored solutions for your Firm or Practice.

Our approach can be described in four parts:

Our role as your technology partner is best described as the technology enabler. By design, Synnch will empower claimants of the R&D tax incentive to create better records. Our role is to facilitate this engagement with your clients in a structured and repeatable way, to save you time. We will provide the training, support, and encouragement to keep your clients on track, but always defer to your expertise as the R&D Consultant for any technical requests.

Although we will encourage you to engage your clients in Synnch, you are not obliged to. How you choose to do this is entirely up to you. The utility of the Synnch platform will provide the means for you to service your clients quickly, and ultimately improve client satisfaction and retention. (Learn more about designing a service level to support your clients in Synnch here).

Perhaps the biggest challenge for your clients when choosing to implement Synnch is the shift from a retrospective mindset when it comes to R&D recordkeeping and substantiation. Despite their motivations for choosing Synnch, your clients will be used to briefing you after the financial year's end and may not have the resourcing or desire to manage their R&D tax incentive compliance proactively.

The secret to helping your clients achieve proactive recordkeeping is preparing the foundation for good recordkeeping as far in advance as possible. Our role in helping your clients achieve this focuses on facilitating activity discovery at the time of deployment. You can read our guide to setting up your clients in Synnch here. Put simply, if your clients have some understanding of their activities in advance, regardless of their ultimate eligibility, their recordkeeping outcomes will be far better off.

As the R&D Consultant, we will look to you to provide an activity framework for your clients at the time of deployment, this proactive approach may represent a change to your service model, however investing time in your client’s recordkeeping strategy will pay dividends when the time comes to prepare their claim, as their records and evidence will be relevant and structured.

As with any technology platform, the test of success is not in the design, but whether users will adopt and ultimately develop routine use over time. To that end, Synnch can be configured to send recordkeeping reminders by email or SMS to some or all users within a given account. Reminders can be designed for a given project or activity, or a given record type – such as observations for an experiment within a given core activity. The more tailored the reminder, the more likelihood the user will complete the task.

These automations are not bound by advice, they only have a marginal cost to establish, but will improve your client’s recordkeeping and understanding of the systematic progression as they interact with them throughout the financial year cycle.

Our purpose as your technology partner is to deliver better workflow efficiency for your Firm or Practice. It takes less than an hour to onboard an average-sized client to Synnch and configures their account. Doing so will place all the resources you need to scope, prepare, and lodge their claim, in a secure web application where you can collaborate with your team.

If your clients achieve even fragmented recordkeeping throughout the year, they will be far better off, having made some effort to establish hypotheses, design experiments and delineate their R&D activities from business as usual.

If your clients achieve high-quality recordkeeping in Synnch and choose to enable payroll mapping and overhead tracking via the Xero integration, Synnch will deliver a comprehensive suite of evidence capable of saving you countless hours in RFIs, scoping and evidence gathering.

If you’d like to learn more about Synnch, and how we can help your clients achieve better recordkeeping while improving your workflow and client service just reach out or head to www.synnch.com.au/partner-portal/.