Contemporaneous Documentation, in Fifteen Minutes a Week

Most claims that fail a review do not fail on eligibility. They fail on evidence. The work was real, the uncertainty was real, and nobody wrote anything down while it was happening.

What Reviewers Ask for First

• Records created during the work, dated, showing who did what.
• Evidence of the hypothesis-and-test cycle, including approaches that failed.
• A basis for the labour allocation: how you concluded a person spent a given share of their time on eligible work.

Notice that all three are things your team already produces in some form. The problem is that they are scattered across commits, tickets, and chat threads with no connective tissue.

The Fifteen-Minute Habit

One document per eligible project. Once a week, whoever is closest to the work adds a dated entry with four lines: what we tried, why, what happened, what we are trying next. Three sentences is enough. Two months of these entries is stronger evidence than a polished narrative written in April.

Free Evidence You Already Have

• Tag commits and pull requests with the project identifier.
• Keep the ticket or branch for abandoned approaches instead of deleting it.
• Save benchmark results, test outputs and error logs from the experiments.
• Keep design discussions in a searchable place rather than in direct messages.

What to Do

1. Open one document per eligible project this week.
2. Put a recurring fifteen-minute slot in the technical lead's calendar.
3. Add a monthly per-person time allocation to your month-end close checklist.

General information for Canadian founders, current to 2026. It is not tax advice and does not account for your specific facts. Rates, thresholds and rules change, confirm the current figures before acting.