Tax Strategy · 2025
A six-figure R&D credit they nearly left on the table
Meridian Robotics
$214K
Credit recovered
−9.1 pts
Effective rate
Monthly
Close cadence
Overview
A restructured tax position and a claimed research credit that turned a growing hardware startup's first profitable year into a reinvestment year.
The challenge
Meridian had scaled from six to forty engineers without ever revisiting its entity structure. Their prior preparer filed a clean but conservative return that ignored the federal R&D credit entirely, and quarterly estimates were guesswork that led to a painful April surprise.
Our approach
We ran a full prior-year review, documented qualifying research activities engineer by engineer, and amended two open years to claim the credit. Going forward we moved them to a monthly close, set defensible quarterly estimates, and modeled an S-corp election against their growth curve.
The outcome
The amended returns and current-year credit returned $214,000 to the business, and the switch to monthly estimates ended the annual cash-flow shock. Meridian now plans hiring against a tax model instead of a hope.
