What a shared page can show
Design thinking often lives in Notion rather than in tickets: the problem, the options weighed, the plan for an experiment and what it found. business.gov.au asks for records made at the time, and lists experimental plans, project plans and meeting records among those that support core R&D. The ATO's ruling TR 2018/2 says electronic records, including records stored in the cloud, are subject to the same record keeping requirements as paper records.
A page's timestamps need reading carefully. The created and last-edited times show when the page was made and when it last changed, not when each paragraph was written, so a hypothesis added in May to a page created in February does not look like February thinking to anyone checking the history. Notion's page history shows the sequence (how far back depends on your Notion plan), and dated headings inside the page make it readable. And a well-kept page supports a claim without settling it: whether the work is R&D depends on its substance, which a person decides.
A design page in practice (illustrative)
The page, dates and people here are illustrative.
An engineer creates "Design: retrieval index v2 (ENG-77)" on 10 February with the problem, the options rejected and a hypothesis. Dated log entries follow through March, and a second engineer adds the conclusion on 2 April.
In Rand the page becomes one record in the financial year that contains 10 February. Its title reads as design work, and the ENG-77 key is noted so a person can see which experiment it belongs to. Rand's AI proposes whether it documents a core activity, records work that supports one, or neither, and your team confirms or answers a question. The record is attributed to the second engineer, because they edited it last, and both its dates, 10 February and 2 April, join that person's estimate. Where that is not who did the work, raise it when the year's hours are checked.
What the connection can see
Notion asks you which pages to share when you connect Rand, and that choice is the boundary. Rand's sync uses Notion's search to list the pages it was given, newest edits first, and never sees a page you did not share. To add a page later, share it with the Rand connection in Notion and the next sync picks it up.
Rand keeps the text of a page's blocks: paragraphs, headings, lists, to-dos, toggles, quotes, callouts, code, table rows and equations. Images, videos, PDFs, files, bookmarks and embeds contribute only their caption, plus a marker that the content was not read, so write results that matter as text. A child page is a record of its own, not part of its parent. A first screen skips archived pages and untitled pages with almost no text, and any Jira or Linear key or pull request link in the title is noted.
Extraction limits
- Each page read is bounded at 25 requests and 40,000 characters, and blocks are followed up to ten levels deep.
- When a page hits a limit, or a request fails, the record says why. A later read that is cut short keeps the text already stored.
- A page Notion reports as unchanged since the last read is not read again.
- An untitled page needs at least 50 characters of text to pass the first screen.
For how to write those pages, see Notion design docs as contemporaneous evidence. Notion records usually sit beside tickets in Jira or Linear. The contemporaneous evidence glossary entry and the R&D Tax Incentive resources cover the wider requirements.