"Contemporaneous" means made at the time. The R&D Tax Incentive is self-assessed, so the company's own records are what AusIndustry and the ATO examine when they review a claim. AusIndustry says records "should be created at the time the activity is conducted".
Which records support which element
Records support a claim; they do not make an activity eligible by themselves. Each element of the test needs its own kind:
- Outcome not knowable in advance: literature, prior-art or patent searches and expert opinion, made before the work starts.
- Hypothesis: a dated note or plan stating what is expected and why, written before the experiment.
- Experiment: test plans stating what will be tested and how the result will be measured.
- Observation: raw results, logs and test reports made during the work.
- Evaluation and conclusion: analysis and a written conclusion after each cycle, including negative results, which also matter for failed experiments.
- Expenditure: timesheets or worklogs, payroll, invoices and the apportionment method, kept as the costs arise.
Why timing decides the claim
A hypothesis written after the result is not evidence that the result was uncertain. Dates need care too: a document's created or last-edited date shows when the file was made or changed, not when each paragraph was written, which only version history shows. TA 2017/5 insists on proper, detailed and contemporaneous records, and criticises accounting systems that do not separate R&D costs as they are incurred. The systematic progression has to be visible in records with dates. The ATO's own record rules add the cost side: records must show how each expense relates to a registered activity, how it was apportioned, that the company received the major benefit, and when any associate amounts were paid.
Records software teams already make
Issue trackers, pull requests, design documents and worklogs are often the best contemporaneous evidence a software company has, though they show what was done and when, not on their own that the work was R&D or how many hours it took. Rand reads these records from GitHub, Jira, Linear and Notion, and its evidence register lists the dated source records behind each registered activity.