Integrate with Clarus R+D

Clarus R+D's tax credit software makes it quick and easy for you to obtain your maximum R&D tax credit. Qualified small businesses may be eligible to claim a federal tax credit for costs related to their research and development activities, up to $250,000 per fiscal year. 

Gusto integrates with Clarus R+D to help streamline company qualification for their eligible R&D tax credits by syncing employee wage data.

Customers who join Gusto from Clarus will receive Gusto free for their first 3 months. 

Step one: Set up the Clarus R+D < > Gusto integration

Connect your accounts to automatically sync the data required to calculate your R&D credit: 

  1. Sign in to Clarus R+D
  2. Under “expenses”, click Payroll.
  3. Scroll to “Payroll Integrations” and click add integration.
    • You’ll be taken to a new “Integrations” page where you can connect or enroll.
  4. Click connect to connect to an existing Gusto account, or click enroll to create a new Gusto account.
    • Existing Gusto customers: sign in with your Gusto credentials and click Authorize.
    • New customers: click to enroll and follow the remaining steps.

Once connected, you should now see Gusto listed under the “integration” column of the “Payroll Integrations” section. Here, you can also view the company name and timestamp(s) for the last import.

Step two: Import payroll data to your R&D study

You can import data as many times as you’d like, there’s no harm in doing so.

  1. Sign in to Clarus R+D
  2. Verify your fiscal year start and end dates in the Company Information portion of the study.
    • You’ll find these in questions 1.7 and 1.8. The date will default to the standard calendar year but can be adjusted to a different time frame or shorter tax year.
  3. Under “expenses”, click Payroll.
  4. Scroll to “Payroll Integrations” and click Import now.
    • Clarus R+D will import employee names, titles, and compensation.
    • You will not be able to edit the name and compensation once imported.
  5. Click the caret next to an employee name to view the percentage of compensation that has been allocated to each project. 
    • Total compensation is what would appear in Box 1 of Form W-2; calculated per employee based on pay dates within the defined fiscal year.
    • Compensation only counts for an R&D credit to the extent that an employee worked on a R&D project. For employees that spend 80% or more of their time on R&D projects, the IRS allows all of their compensation to be counted.

Adding and matching employees

If someone has not been imported, you can click add new employee to add someone manually in the Payroll section.

In the event you’ve added someone manually, and the employee has also been imported from Gusto, if the names match exactly, the system will recognize the duplicate and tie the records together.

In all other cases, the manually entered employee and the imported employee (with different spellings) will both remain in the study. If this is not supposed to be the case, use the trash can icon to delete the incorrect/duplicate record–you do not want to overreport wages in the study.

Step three: Make sure you have an accountant firm connected to your Gusto account

An accountant firm is required on your account in order to set you up to claim the R&D tax credit in Gusto.

Claim the Federal R&D Tax Credit in real time

Once the accountant firm has set you up to claim the Federal R&D Tax Credit, you can claim the credit against your employer Social Security taxes in real time. Important: This setting only appears in your account if there's a remaining balance to apply credit to. It also depends on when your accountant filed your most recent business income tax return, because you're eligible to claim the credit on the first day of the following quarter. Example: if your return was filed in May, then the credit period begins July 1st (the first day of the next quarter) and runs through June 30th of the next year.  

This means Gusto will not withhold/debit the "employer" portion of Social Security tax on your employee's payroll if real time is enabled.

  1. In Gusto, go to the Settings section.
  2. Click the Preferences tab.
  3. Under Toppings, Click edit next to Real Time Federal R&D Tax Credit.
  4. Toggle to Enable.
  5. Click Save.

You will see the R&D Tax Credit savings on the next payroll you process.

Reconnect or disconnect the integration

  1. Sign in to Clarus R+D
  2. Click Clarus R+D in the top-right of the page.
  3. Click Integrations. 
  4. Click reconnect to refresh the connection, or disconnect to stop the integration with Gusto.

Still need help? 

Reach out to Clarus R+D.