About RetroacDev

RetroacDev grew out of a software engineering company in Boston called Zagaran.  We had built software products for startups, Fortune 500 companies, government, hospitals, and Harvard and MIT.  We had also built a SaaS product of our own, and we found out it qualified for the R&D Credit.

Our CPA was happy to help us file for the R&D Credit, but we had no records to show her because like many startups, we hadn't been using a time tracking system.  But we did have all our code changes saved in Git (a version control system), so we wrote some scripts to extract that data and use it to document what activities we'd done, who’d done them, and how much of their time they'd spent.  That got us an $11,000 R&D Credit the first year we used it.

We knew there must be other small companies in our situation, so we built our scripts into a product for others to use.  One of our earliest adopters was a startup that used RetroacDev to file for $25,000 in credits, which helped them extend their runway long enough to launch a hit product and get acquired by Facebook.

Several CPAs told us their startup clients were already claiming the R&D Credit but were using guesswork and minimal documentation.  One said that the biggest thing keeping him up at night was worrying about his startup clients getting their R&D Credits audited and losing their hard-won cash.

We're not CPAs ourselves but we are experts on how companies build software, so we decided to build tools that empower accountants to claim R&D credits for tech startups.  Companies are recording more and more data as byproducts of their regular work processes, and RetroacDev harnesses that data to better substantiate R&D studies.  We're on a mission to help accountants create high-quality R&D studies for tech companies of all types.