About vvast
vvast is a direct consumer e-commerce acceleration and management service business that supports non-UK registered brands, EMEA-based brands and US-owned local entities to establish an e-commerce solution to trade in EMEA online.
This involves the design and build of the website, managing changes in the trading strategy, customer service, warehousing, processing returns and supporting the online marketing.
It’s R&D is centred around the platform it has built to support this: vvastify.
The challenge
Aware that it may be eligible for R&D tax credits, vvast sought a trusted partner to help qualify its R&D and advise on how to adapt its processes to effectively capture that R&D. Following a recommendation from the e-commerce technical community, vvast partnered with ForrestBrown for its first R&D tax relief claim in 2018 and has claimed each year since.
Although vvast tracked the amount of time its development team spent on projects, the team realised during its first claim that the level of the granularity needed for data capture wasn’t detailed enough.
The due diligence that ForrestBrown did was thorough and highlighted where our data capture could be improved. For our second claim year, we adapted our time capture systems to properly record our project team’s time. As a result, our next claim was fully optimised.
ForrestBrown’s value
While vvast felt the benefit of ForrestBrown’s technical guidance, it also found significant value in the quality of its plain English, “easy-to-interpret” documentation. vvast has been able to utilise this within its own internal teams to demonstrate why a certain process is being followed and why detail needs to be captured. This has been particularly useful for the product team to help it understand how much of the roadmap can be leveraged in the claim.
ForrestBrown’s experience in claiming R&D tax credits and ability to interpret changes in the legislation has been hugely beneficial. It’s a no-brainer employing proven specialists that will work with us collaboratively over many years to realise the potential return.
Impact
Working with ForrestBrown has helped vvast to realise the full value of its R&D, enabling it to grow more quickly. It plans to continue using ForrestBrown to support future claims as it moves into AI-powered SaaS.
We’re further along our innovation roadmap as a result of being able to optimise our claims. We haven’t had to secure more funding to do certain things, instead reinvesting the benefit into the business.
Final reflection
The whole ForrestBrown team are a pleasure to work with. The technical team really understand our R&D and their development of staff highlights the strength of the culture – something that is important to us as a B Corp.
Richie Jones, CEO & Founder, vvast