Most accountants serving tech are accountants first and tax advisers second. We’re the other way round — Chartered Tax Advisers (CTA) and Fellow ACCA, with an active Head of Tax — Europe role at a major digital infrastructure operator. R&D claims, EMI schemes, international structuring and growth-stage tax planning, handled in-house.
Most software and technology businesses are served by accountants whose technical depth ends at year-end statutory accounts and an outsourced R&D referral. That works while the business is small and the tax position is simple. It stops working the moment the business has employees worth giving equity to, customers in multiple jurisdictions, R&D activity worth claiming for, or investors who care about how the cap table is structured.
The recent direction of travel makes this gap wider. The R&D regime has been overhauled twice in three years (the merged RDEC scheme from April 2024, the ERIS regime for R&D-intensive SMEs, and the new disclosure requirements that have caused HMRC reject rates to rise sharply). EMI schemes remain the single most tax-efficient way to give equity to UK employees but the rules around exercise, valuation and qualifying conditions trip up companies that don’t structure them carefully. Dividend tax rates rose again in April 2026 to 10.75% basic / 35.75% higher / 39.35% additional — meaning the historic founder profit-extraction model needs revisiting. And from January 2026, transfer pricing rules apply to a wider definition of related parties, catching multi-jurisdiction tech groups that previously sat below the threshold.
None of this is unmanageable. But it requires a tax adviser who actually engages with these regimes — not one who sees them as something to outsource to a specialist on referral. We’re CTA-qualified and FCCA, with an active Head of Tax — Europe role at a major digital infrastructure operator. That combination is unusual in firms of our size, and it’s the practical reason tech founders end up working with us rather than with a generalist accountancy practice.
Our typical tech client is a UK-incorporated growth-stage business — usually £500k to £20m in revenue, post-product-market-fit, profitable or close to it, with 10 to 100 employees. The sub-sectors we work most often with are:
We deliberately don’t lead with early-stage pre-revenue startups. The fee economics rarely work for either side — startups need cheap monthly bookkeeping, not £150-an-hour tax advisory. If that’s where you are, we’ll be honest about it and point you elsewhere.
HMRC’s compliance posture on R&D claims has hardened significantly. The Additional Information Form requirement, the senior officer attestation, and the rise in enquiry rates mean that loosely-prepared claims are being rejected or pared back at much higher rates than three years ago. We prepare claims with proper technical narratives that articulate the scientific or technological uncertainty being resolved, the qualifying expenditure analysis with proper apportionment, and the documentation HMRC expects to see if they enquire. We’re more cautious than some — we’d rather submit a smaller, robust claim than a larger one that gets pared back to nothing after a 12-month enquiry.
For most tech businesses, EMI is the single most tax-efficient way to give equity to employees, and the most underused tool in the UK tax code. We handle the full setup: HMRC valuation submission, scheme rules and option agreements, the company-side EMI notification, and the ongoing annual return obligations. We also advise on alternative structures (growth shares, unapproved options, phantom equity) where EMI doesn’t qualify or where the employee profile is wrong for it. For founders, we model the BADR position on exit so the option scheme integrates with personal tax planning.
UK tech businesses with international customers, US investors, or overseas teams face a tax stack that sits uncomfortably between UK domestic tax, US federal/state tax, EU VAT and treaty positions. We advise on UK Ltd vs Delaware C-Corp parent structures (and the migration cost of changing later), international employer obligations for remote engineers, transfer pricing for intra-group services, place-of-supply analysis for SaaS and digital services, and treaty-based withholding planning on royalty and licence flows. For US expansion, we work alongside US CPA partners.
Owner-managed tech companies typically extract profits via a mix of salary, dividends and pension contributions. With dividend tax rates rising again from April 2026 (basic 10.75%, higher 35.75%, additional 39.35%) and pension annual allowance at £60,000, the optimal extraction mix has shifted. Employer pension contributions reduce corporation tax, are NIC-free, and don’t count against the personal annual allowance — they have become the most tax-efficient component of founder remuneration for most growth-stage tech companies. We model the extraction position annually as part of the year-end planning cycle.
Whether the exit horizon is 18 months or five years, planning for it changes what you do today. BADR (Business Asset Disposal Relief) at 18% is available on up to £1m of qualifying lifetime gains, requiring 10%+ ownership held for at least two years and the company being substantially trading throughout. The qualifying conditions are easy to break inadvertently — large investment portfolios on the balance sheet, substantial non-trading subsidiaries, or share class restructuring done without thinking about the BADR clock. We advise on the structural decisions that protect the relief.
This specialism is the right fit for technology and software businesses with:
It’s not the right fit for:
Three engagements that illustrate what tech tax work actually looks like in practice:
B2B SaaS, £4m ARR, Series A funded. Previous accountant had submitted R&D claims aggressively, treating roughly 80% of engineering payroll as qualifying. Our review concluded the qualifying portion was closer to 45% — the rest was routine implementation work that wouldn’t survive enquiry. Re-prepared the current-year claim at the lower figure, refunded the over-claim from the prior period proactively, and avoided what would likely have been a multi-year HMRC enquiry with penalty exposure. Lower headline claim, but secure and defensible.
IT consultancy, 28 staff, owner-managed. Founder extracting profits via low salary plus dividends — efficient under the old rules, but with dividend rates rising in April 2026 and a £200k annual extraction need, the mix needed updating. Restructured to add £40k of annual employer pension contributions, recovered approximately £14,000 in annual tax across the founder and the company, and built a proper pension provision the founder previously didn’t have.
AI/ML company expanding to the US. Founders considering moving the parent company to a Delaware C-Corp under VC pressure. Modelled both routes including loss of EIS for existing investors, EMI scheme migration cost, US federal tax exposure of the C-Corp, and the practical exit difference. Outcome: kept UK Ltd parent, set up US Inc subsidiary instead, preserved EIS reliefs and EMI scheme, and saved the migration costs entirely. The VC ultimately accepted the structure.
Explore our tools and articles to see how we think about technology tax planning.
Three areas of focus, plus full coverage of personal and business tax across all sectors.
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