SaaS companies are among the most frequent SR&ED claimants in Canada — and among the most likely to under-claim, because so much of the eligible work happens inside ordinary sprint cycles rather than a labelled “R&D project.”
Where SaaS Eligibility Commonly Shows Up
- Scaling architecture to handle load, concurrency, or data volumes beyond what the original design was built for, where the outcome of a given approach isn’t predictable in advance
- Building novel integrations or data synchronization logic between systems that weren’t designed to interoperate, where standard APIs and documented patterns don’t resolve the conflict
- Solving performance bottlenecks that require redesigning core algorithms or data structures rather than routine tuning
- Developing new approaches to multi-tenancy, data isolation, or security constraints where existing patterns don’t fit the product’s specific requirements
Where It Usually Doesn’t Apply
- Standard CRUD feature development using well-established frameworks and patterns
- UI/UX design and styling work
- Configuring third-party SaaS tools or infrastructure using documented settings
- Routine bug fixes and maintenance within a known, working system
Why SaaS Teams Under-Claim
Engineering work at a SaaS company is usually organized around product roadmaps and sprints, not R&D projects — which means eligible technical problem-solving is scattered across many tickets rather than sitting in one obvious bucket. The fix isn’t reorganizing engineering; it’s reviewing sprint history and architecture decisions with an eye for where the team genuinely didn’t know if an approach would work.
A Practical Starting Point
Pull the last year of architecture decision records, major incident postmortems, and scaling-related tickets. Projects that involved genuine trial-and-error against unpredictable system behaviour — not just implementation effort — are the strongest candidates for a claim.
