On SR&ED, no retainer, no hourly billing, and no fee unless a credit reaches your account. Grant applications are charged separately, as a flat fee agreed before the work starts. Both are quoted in writing, and neither changes while you are a client.
On SR&ED and the tax credits that sit alongside it, Sivanta is paid a percentage of the credit you actually receive. Not of the credit claimed, and not of the credit estimated at the start. If the CRA reduces the claim, the fee falls with it. If nothing is recovered, there is no fee.
That arrangement exists because it puts the risk in the right place. You are being asked to hand over technical information about work you already did, on the strength of a judgment about whether it qualifies. The person making that judgment should carry the consequences of getting it wrong.
A percentage on a web page tells you very little, because it is only half of the arithmetic. The half that matters is what the percentage is applied to, and how much of it survives a review.
Two companies can recover an identical credit and require completely different amounts of work to get there. One has three years of clean timesheets, a single continuing project, and an accountant who has filed the schedules before. The other has five projects across two provinces, records that have to be reconstructed from memory and email, and a grant that has to be coordinated so it does not quietly reduce the claim. Quoting both the same number would mean one of them is subsidising the other.
So the rate is quoted on your file, in writing, at the first call, before any work starts. You are told which factors moved it and why. Nothing begins until you have that in front of you.
One quote covers the whole claim, from the first technical conversation to the CRA's final assessment. There are no separate line items for the parts that turn out to be difficult.
These are the factors that are actually assessed, and roughly which direction each one pushes.
Your rate is agreed in writing at the start and does not change while you remain a client. It does not rise because your claim grew, and it is not adjusted after a good year.
It reopens only on a material change in scope, and only in writing: a new province, a substantially different set of projects, or grant work that was not part of the original engagement. You would know about any of those before they happened, because you would have asked for them.
A minimum applies per claim year, and you are told what it is at the first call. It exists because a small claim is not a small file. The interviews take the same time, the narratives take the same care, and the claim has to survive the same review as a large one. Below a certain size, a contingency percentage does not cover the work honestly, and pretending otherwise would mean cutting corners somewhere you cannot see.
If your claim is likely to fall below that line, you will hear so on the first call, along with a straight answer about whether filing is worth doing at all this year.
The contingency arrangement above applies to SR&ED only. Grant applications such as IRAP, CanExport, Mitacs and hiring programs are charged as a flat fee per application, agreed before any work begins and invoiced upfront: half on engagement, half on submission.
Why the difference is not arbitrary. A tax credit is decided on an amount: the work either qualifies or it does not, and if it does, a calculable sum comes back. A grant is decided on approval, in a competitive round, against other applicants and a fixed budget. A well-built application can lose for reasons that have nothing to do with its quality, and often does. Charging a percentage on that would mean doing the entire piece of work for nothing on a file that was prepared properly, which is not a sustainable arrangement for either side and quietly pushes an advisor toward volume over care.
The second reason is about your interests, not mine. If grant work sat inside the same contingency percentage as the tax credit, there would be an incentive to apply for every grant available. Some grants reduce your SR&ED base by more than they pay you. Keeping the two priced separately means the recommendation about whether to apply at all is made on the arithmetic, not on how the advisor gets paid.
Is the rate negotiable? The quote reflects the work in front of it, so the honest answer is that the scope is negotiable and the rate follows it. If a number looks high, the useful conversation is about which factors put it there and whether any of them can be changed, usually by improving records before the year ends.
Can we compare you to another advisor? Yes, and you should. When you do, compare three things and not one: whether the percentage is applied to the credit claimed or the credit received, whether CRA review support is included or billed extra, and who actually writes the narrative. A lower percentage that excludes review support is not a lower price, it is a deferred one.
What if we already have an advisor? Then the question is not price, it is whether the claim is being prepared by the person who will defend it. If those are two different people, that is worth knowing before a review rather than during one.
Do you take a percentage of the provincial credit as well? The rate applies to the total credit recovered, federal and provincial together, because both are prepared as one claim. This is stated in the engagement letter.
What happens if the CRA reduces the claim? The fee is calculated on what you actually receive, so it falls with the claim. That is the whole point of the arrangement.
A first call is a conversation about your projects, not a sales process. By the end of it you will know whether the work qualifies, roughly what it is worth, and exactly what preparing it would cost. All three, before anything is signed.
Book a call Check your eligibility firstGeneral information about how Sivanta charges. The engagement letter for your file governs, and is provided before any work begins.
© Sivanta Solutions Inc. · poorva@sivanta.ca · sivanta.ca