Who is responsible for recordkeeping, and how frequently should they do it?

The recordkeeping strategy is the combination of the people and routine required to document your clients R&D activities effectively and contemporaneously in Synnch. Identifying the right persons to drive recordkeeping activities within your clients’ businesses will be critical to a healthy claim, whether they use Synnch or not. Below are some key considerations to factor when supporting your clients to develop a recordkeeping strategy:

Persons driving recordkeeping activities in Synnch must have sufficient technical understanding of their R&D activities and have the time and capacity to create effective records. Within smaller teams, the requisite technical knowledge is often siloed with one individual, if this individual is also the founder or Director, their commercial obligations in running the company almost always outweigh any commitment to compliance. Conversely, delegating this responsibility to the wrong person may result in insufficient technical knowledge resulting in records lacking in technical rigour.

The goldilocks zone to aim for when selecting persons to drive recordkeeping activities should be a combination of:

Many other factors can also influence or inhibit effective recordkeeping, such as job design, leadership buy-in, company culture, and identification and management of noncompliance risks.

Helping your clients choose the right recordkeeping frequency is critical to establishing recordkeeping success. Understanding the meetings and rituals consistently taking place in your client’s businesses can offer an existing routine on which to piggyback a strong compliance regime. The type of meeting, those present, and any materials or resources produced will aid in selecting the right meeting for the purpose. Often an existing new product development or strategy meeting can simply be enhanced with the addition of an R&D compliance agenda for great effect. If your clients don’t have a culture of regular meetings or lack meeting discipline R&D meetings can be a good place to start. A key piece of contemporaneous evidence, such as meeting minutes, sprint plans or job sheets can also be a great trigger point for creating a corresponding record in Synnch.

The main factor inhibiting consistent recordkeeping is sufficient capacity and resourcing. It’s more realistic to establish a recordkeeping frequency that your clients can achieve and build on this as they develop a routine and a better understanding of their compliance obligations. This emphasises the importance of the substantiation plan, if evidence can be identified and assessed within your client's existing systems and technology at a contemporaneous interval, it will provide the backbone on which to build the technical substantiation in Synnch at a more achievable frequency.

For example, your client may contemporaneously tag their R&D activities in their own systems, while only exporting or linking this evidence in Synnch monthly or even quarterly. The key to this approach is ensuring adequate scientific rigour is added at this time.

As with any well-designed management system, creating redundancy and ensuring accountability are key considerations. This is an often-overlooked issue when developing a successful recordkeeping strategy. Common risks include the loss of key technical staff resulting in the loss of scheme and compliance know-how. Or the lack of leadership buy-in and oversight, resulting in absent or ineffective governance of recordkeeping activities.

Synnch can help mitigate these factors by shifting the R&D company knowledge from one staff member to a secure web-based platform, then creating ownership permissions across projects, and activities along with corresponding automations and reminders.