As part of your R&D Tax methodology you will claim for the projects in which qualifying R&D occurred. You may have one or several R&D projects or an over-arching commercial project which triggers the need for separate scientific or technological development as a R&D project.
In order to build a robust claim you need to ensure that:

• Project is relevant to the company’s trading activities or industry
• Focus of the project is to either create something new, improve existing solutions, or replicate something in a fundamentally different way
• Advance must aim to move knowledge and capabilities beyond the existing baseline in science or technology.
• Work must involve scientific or technological uncertainty. It’s not enough to seek an advance; the work must go beyond the baseline knowledge and capabilities in the field.
• Given the constraints of your project and the information in the public domain you must establish that the uncertainties would not be readily deducible or easy to solve by another competent professional in the field
• Boundaries of the project relate to the uncertainties, once the technological/scientific uncertainty is resolved so is the R&D project.
• Disqualify routine activities and only include activities and related costs up until the uncertainty is resolved