R&D Tax Credit Reporting
If your firm claims the R&D Tax Credit, BaseBuilders can generate the labor report your CPA needs directly from your existing time tracking data — no separate spreadsheet or manual reconstruction required.
The report pulls from data you're already capturing as part of normal project time entry: staff, date, project, phase, activity, hours, direct labor value, and comments. Your CPA uses this to calculate qualified research wages and determine which entries qualify — BaseBuilders organizes the data; your CPA makes the qualification call.
(For the full picture on what the R&D Tax Credit is, how it applies to A/E firms, and what each column in the report means to your CPA, see our complete guide.)
How to Run an R&D Tax Credit Report
This report relies on column sets — if you're not familiar with how those work, see this article first.
New clients are set up with a pre-built R&D Tax Credit column set on Time Reports by default. It's a custom column set, not a system one, so your firm may have renamed it or adjusted which fields it includes — check with whoever manages your settings if you're not sure what it's called on your account.
Running the report takes three steps. The order of steps 1 and 2 doesn't matter — do whichever is easier for you first.
Step 1: Query for the date range you need
From Time Slips, open the query builder and set your Date Range to whatever period your CPA needs — this doesn't have to be a calendar year; use whatever range matches your reporting needs.
Under Classification, check only Project (leave Proposal, Admin/Overhead, and Benefit unchecked). This limits the results to billable project work, which is what the credit calculation is based on.
Step 2: Select the R&D Tax Credit column set
Click the column set selector (top right of the list view) and choose your R&D Tax Credit column set — or whatever your firm has named it.
Step 3: Export to Excel
Click the export/download icon. Choose Excel Spreadsheet (.xlsx) as the format, and make sure Include Comments is toggled on.
Export to Excel rather than running the report in-app. Running a report within BaseBuilders generates a PDF, which is fine for viewing but not ideal for handing off. Exporting to Excel gives your CPA a working spreadsheet they can sort, filter, and manipulate directly — which is what they'll actually want to do with this data.
Questions about what qualifies for the credit, or how to interpret the report once you have it? That's a conversation for your CPA — BaseBuilders organizes your labor data, but qualification decisions are outside what we can advise on.