Be Excellent To Each Other

It seems that we've received an email from a company advertising their services at helping companies claim this (or see if they're eligible to claim it). Enough people have said maybe to it that it's come to me, and I've sort of shrugged at it. The company has been in and talked to me and think that maybe we might be eligible, but they want me to talk to someone more qualified (in software terms) to decide. I'm assuming this bit will probably cost us money, but I'm not paying, so

From what I can see on the HMRC website, then I need to be writing seriously ground breaking software that might possibly further the cause of mankind, which let's face it, I'm not. I can't find the page I was reading at work, but there was a software example, and pretty much everything that I do was firmly on the non-qualifying list.

So, anyone work for a company that does claim it, or knows that they don't qualify, or has never heard of it before, but is going to suggest it in the morning for a big pat on the back?

I'm pretty certain our company claims it, and we're hardly curing lupus or building robot butlers. We have real lawyers and accountants who handle that stuff for us though - I don't know if a normal person could do it themselves. I will try to poke my nose into our legal what-nots and report back.

I imagine that some of those who know thier company collects it aren't allowed to say as such.

Having read that link again, I can't see how on earth we'd qualify. So either our lawyers and accountants are awesome, we're slipping our tax inspector a back-hander to let it through, or we're not using that and are going through some other tax scheme instead.

We collected it last year. If you do something unique in your field with software, you're in with a shot.

Half of what I do is copied and pasted from the internet, the other half I just make up and see what works, so I have no idea of how unique it is.

I wrote a Master System game last year. That count?

We developed our in house quoting, inventory, crm and Helpdesk system and claimed it ok. I can ask our finance bod if we used a third party or not if you like.

We're going through this at work at the moment with a company called Leyton. The process is quite involved but they do seem to be able to get good results from it. I can't go into more detail in our particular case for obvious reasons, but they will be able to tell you if you're in with a shot of qualifying or not based on an appraisal of the sort of stuff that you do.

I think it's a pretty safe bet that we'd go through a third party, just more a question of whether it's worth pursuing. The general consensus seems to be, maybe, so I'll let the powers that be decide if they want to proceed and hope I get more than a few hours notice next time.

Our accountant sorted ours out.

Really? Where do I find out more?

Right here: http://www.mrdictionary.net/gravitybeam_mastersystem/ :)

It was a competition entry. Kicked butt, it did. http://www.smspower.org/Homebrew/Gravit ... Gaiden-SMS