Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions from accounting firms evaluating Incentive Partner — addressed in plain language.
01 — The basics
Incentive Partner is white-labeled R&D tax study software for accounting firms. We help your firm identify which of your business clients qualify for the federal R&D tax credit, run each study end-to-end through a combination of software and tax specialists, and deliver everything under your firm's brand.
The result is a high-value specialty service line for your firm — without the staff, the credentials, or the build cost typically required to offer it.
R&D activities qualify across far more of the economy than most firms assume. Manufacturers refining processes. Software shops iterating on architecture. Engineering firms working through new designs. Food and beverage companies developing new formulations. Specialty trades doing engineered solutions. Life sciences, agriculture, biotech, and architecture all commonly qualify.
The shorthand: any client doing technical work to develop or improve a product, process, formulation, or system — and bearing some uncertainty in how to do it — is worth investigating. Incentive Partner reviews your full client book and flags who is likely to qualify, with a sized credit estimate for each.
No. R&D tax expertise lives inside Incentive Partner. The platform calculates each study against current tax code; our specialists review every study against case law, IRS guidance, and prior audit outcomes; substantiation is documented as the study is built.
Your firm's role is to bring the client relationship and file the return. The technical R&D tax work is ours. Your staff's hours stay yours.
02 — How it works
Your firm gets a portal view of your client book, with each business client flagged as likely-to-qualify, possible, or out-of-scope, and an estimated credit value next to those who qualify. You decide which opportunities to pursue and when.
For each study you run, you set the bill, you bring the conversation to the client under your firm's name, and you ultimately file the return. The R&D study itself — the calculation, the substantiation, the client support, the audit-readiness — happens through Incentive Partner. You stay in the relationship; the technical work is handled.
Your client receives an invitation from your firm, with your firm's brand on it. They complete the study inside the platform — answering questions about their work, uploading documents, communicating with our R&D specialists as needed. The portal, the communications, the deliverables — all of it carries your firm's brand.
What your client experiences is a new capability from your firm.
Only if your firm chooses to enable that.
Incentive Partner has an optional co-marketing feature: when opportunities are identified in your book, the platform can send a postal letter on your firm's behalf — under your firm's brand — informing the client of the opportunity and inviting them to participate. Many firms find this useful when they have a long client list to work through.
Other firms prefer to deliver this news in person. The feature is opt-in and the platform supports both modes equally. Your firm's relationship with your client is yours to manage.
Each study is handled by three layers working together:
The specialists are credentialed R&D tax professionals — the people you'd hire if you were building this capability internally. They support your clients responsively and directly throughout the study.
Most studies move from kickoff to completion within a few weeks, depending on the client's responsiveness and the complexity of their R&D work. The platform's structured intake compresses what was traditionally a months-long interview process into an asynchronous workflow that fits inside your client's normal calendar.
Studies typically finalize well inside the relevant tax cycle.
03 — Pricing & billing
Incentive Partner operates with a simple revenue-share model. We earn a share of what your firm bills for a study — paid only when your client actually captures a credit. We earn when your firm earns.
There is no separate revenue stream. No subscription. No platform fee. No upsell tier. This straightforward partnership is our model.
No. Clients are billed using a scope-of-study billing model — calibrated to the dimension of the work being done, paid only when the credit is captured.
The distinction matters. Contingent fees are restricted in tax practice in specific contexts under the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct, and we've intentionally structured our model to operate cleanly outside those restrictions. The work scales with the size of the qualifying R&D activity (which is what drives the study's scope). The fee scales with the work. The credit follows from the qualifying activity. There is no implicit incentive that places your firm or your client in a position the AICPA would flag.
Everything required to deliver the study, including:
The only items handled separately are occasional direct costs — for example, postage for the optional co-marketing feature — at cost.
None. Specifically:
These are commitments about the shape of the relationship, not pricing tactics. The model works because we're aligned with your firm's success — not because we lock you in.
04 — Risk and accuracy
Audit defense is included. If a study is ever examined, the same specialists who built it handle the response — preparing the substantiation, drafting the position, and working through the audit alongside the client. Your firm doesn't carry the technical-defense burden.
Substantiation isn't bolted on after the fact. It's documented as the study is built — meaning the study is audit-ready on day one. The standard isn't will this look fine? It's will this hold up if it's examined?
Increased scrutiny is precisely why audit-readiness is built into the platform from the first step — not bolted on at the end. Each study is calculated against the current tax code, reviewed by AI against prior case law and IRS guidance, and verified by human R&D specialists. Substantiation is documented as the work is done, against the standards a Big-4 R&D practice would hold itself to.
This is also why the same specialists who build a study handle its defense. The work is built to a standard that holds up; if scrutiny comes, the substantiation is already there.
Three reviews, in order:
The combination is more rigorous than any single layer alone. The result is a study substantiated to the standard the IRS would expect to see.
05 — Decision-making
Most platforms in this space were built one of two ways: software-only, with the specialist work outsourced; or specialist-firms with a thin software wrapper. Neither structure produces what firms actually want.
Incentive Partner was built deliberately as software and specialists together — neither subordinated to the other. The platform calculates and reviews; the specialists support clients personally and verify each study. It's a different shape from anything else available, because no other team had both halves of the founding expertise.
We don't expect prior bad experiences to disappear on hearing this. We expect to earn the second look on the work.
Hiring an in-house R&D specialist takes 6 to 18 months and several hundred thousand dollars in fully-loaded annual cost — for a single specialist who, even at full utilization, can only deliver so many studies a year.
Through Incentive Partner, your firm can deliver the same volume of work without the hire, the recruiting cycle, the management overhead, or the risk of losing the specialist after two years. Your firm captures most of the per-study economics. And there's no commitment — if your firm later decides to bring this fully in-house, there's nothing locking you in.
The partnership conversation usually has three things to nail:
We'd love to talk through anything we haven't covered.