How CoLab reclaimed 100 hours from R&D tax filings

The program provides refundable tax credits for companies conducting research and development activities, including much of the experimental work that happens in software development. Debugging complex technical problems, developing custom integrations, or building novel features can all qualify—work that many startups are doing anyway.

For CoLab, the time savings were significant, but the real impact came in how CoLab could deploy the recovered funding. SR&ED credits directly enabled some of the platform’s most important new features.

This included Follow Mode, which allows teams to troubleshoot CAD projects in real-time across different locations, even out in the field. The recovered funding also powered CoLab’s Review Notebooks, bringing asynchronous collaboration capabilities similar to Google Docs into the design review environment for the first time.

“I think they’ve been able to not only gain back time, but their claims have been more successful in terms of dollar amounts as well,” Mireault noted. “For a high-growth company at our stage, any additional capital that we can save or bring in is hugely beneficial to our innovation. It means we can hire more people, it means we can work on more projects, and it means we can get cooler stuff out to our customers faster.”

What made the difference wasn’t just process efficiency; it was technological understanding. Many traditional accounting firms treat SR&ED as a compliance exercise, but CoLab found that working with a team that understood SaaS development fundamentally changed the experience.

“It wasn’t just that we were super engaged, it’s that we actually understand the technology side of it right from the first call,” Mireault explained. “It’s probably because we’re also building a SaaS application—and a high technology solution to this problem—so there’s just a lot more of that technological thinking and technology knowledge within the company.”

This technical fluency meant fewer translation barriers between CoLab’s development work and the SR&ED filing requirements. Instead of lengthy explanations about software architecture or development challenges, the conversation could focus on identifying which innovations qualified for credits.

“It’s like: We are building a SaaS solution, they’re building a SaaS solution, we know their space better than any of these other providers, so we’re going to be easier to work with and we’re going to understand the same problems they’re having,” Mireault said.

For development teams already pushing technical boundaries, that combination of efficiency and funding can make the difference between incremental progress and breakthrough capabilities. For team members at CoLab, which partnered on a case study with Boast, the additional capital “means we can get cooler stuff out to our customers faster.”