It is fair to ask whether sector pages on an accountancy site are anything more than the same page with a different word dropped in. On most sites they are. Here is why they are not.
Which costs qualify differs enormously. A SaaS company's R&D claim is engineering payroll and the cloud behind it. A hardware company's is materials genuinely used up across failed iterations. A biotech's is mostly payments to a contract research organisation, restricted to 65% and claimable only by whoever actually commissioned the work. An AI company's is dominated by compute, which only became claimable in April 2023 and is still routinely left out. Same relief, four completely different claims.
The route that pays more differs too. Loss-making companies spending at least 30% of total expenditure on qualifying R&D can use Enhanced R&D Intensive Support at roughly 27p in the pound rather than about 16p on the merged scheme. Deep tech and biotech usually clear that threshold with room to spare. A growing e-commerce brand almost never does. The calculation has to happen before anything is filed, and it is the single most valuable ten minutes in the whole engagement.
And the trap is sector-specific. SaaS gets deferred revenue wrong and reports a collapse in year two. E-commerce books the marketplace payout as revenue and crosses the VAT threshold without noticing. Fintech runs on contractors and discovers the PAYE cap after the credit is already in the forecast. Biotech finds out the CRO commissioned the research, not them. None of these are exotic. All of them are expensive, and all of them are avoidable if somebody asks the right question in month one rather than month thirteen.
Pick your sector below. Each page sets out where the money goes, where the relief lands, a worked example with real arithmetic, and the questions founders in that field actually ask.
