Your 2026 WBSO Application has been approved, now what?
Every year, approximately 20,000 entrepreneurs reduce their costs with the WBSO. However, many more entrepreneurs apply but fail to realise cost savings due to cumbersome hours administration and improper provision of technical documentation requirements. In this article, we highlight some of the challenges applicants can face when recording hours administration and submitting their year-end WBSO determination.
What is the WBSO?
The (Wet Bevordering Speur en Ontwikkelingswerk) WBSO (R&D tax credit) is a Dutch Government tax incentive scheme from the (Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland) RVO Netherlands, that helps 20,000 companies each year by offering compensation for part of your research and development (R&D) (TRL 2-4) wage costs, other costs and expenditures. In practice the scheme reduces your payroll tax burden. Each year, the Dutch government allocates the WBSO budget as part of the Tax Plan. For 2026, the WBSO budget is € 1.817 billion. The majority of applications can expect to hear back within 3 months.
You received the WBSO, now what?
The RVO has approved your WBSO application. Congratulations! You can already start providing an estimate of the hours worked (and any costs and expenses).
Follow these steps to monitor whether the estimate is correct:
- In your own administration, you record per person, per project, per day which hours (and possibly also costs and expenses) were spent on R&D.
- You keep software commits or documents such as reports, drawings or research results to demonstrate the progress of your R&D project.
- You will receive your financial benefit by including the WBSO in your payroll tax or income tax return. Ensure that you use up the full benefit to maximize the full WBSO.
Administrative Obligations
The RVO provides the following checklist to ensure that applicants are compliant with the administrative obligations of the WBSO:
| Type of Company | B.V with R&D Declaration based on actual costs and expenditures | B.V. with R&D Declaration based on a fixed amount (lump-sum) | Independent entrepreneur (ZZP) or general partnership (VOF) without employees |
|---|---|---|---|
| You keep proper administrative records | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| You must report no later than 31 March 2026 how many hours you have spent on R&D. | Yes | Yes | N/A |
| You keep an administration of the actual costs and expenditures incurred, no later than 31 March 2026. | Yes | N/A | N/A |
| You provide the citizen service numbers (bsn’s) of the employees who carried out R&D work in 2025. These R&D employees have to be registered in your R&D time sheet administration for 2025. RVO uses this information to calculate the R&D hourly wage for a possible application in 2027. You can report bsn’s digitally via mijn.rvo.nl/wbso. | Yes | Yes | N/A |
| You must report no later than 31 March 2026 the R&D hours spent if this amount is less than 500 hours. If so, RVO will withdraw your R&D Declaration and you will be unable to apply the R&D deduction to your income tax return. | N/A | N/A | Yes |
What does good Hours Administration for the WBSO look like?
For each project, good R&D records provide clear and simple insight into the nature, content, progress (project administration) and scope (time sheet administration) of the R&D activities performed. For example:
- Time Sheet Administration: Your time recording should keep track of the days and the number of hours per day that a given member of staff spent on R&D, as well as the project involved.
- Project Administration: The activities that you carry out must be in agreement with the projects approved by RVO. Project administration provides insight into the nature, content and progress of the R&D activities carried out within the project. The project administration can consist of various documents (digital or otherwise) such as meeting documents and reports, drawings, correspondence, photographs of prototypes, test results, measurement reports, calculations, and so on.
- Year-end Determination: For each R&D project, this overview provides insight into the costs and expenditures incurred as well as the related payments. This document also clearly shows the extent to which these costs/expenditures are attributable/related to the R&D work that has been carried out for each project.
How to keep good R&D administrative records for the WBSO
- Start keeping track of the R&D administration from the start of a project, even if you have not yet received an R&D Declaration.
- Ensure that your R&D administration complies with statutory requirements as a minimum. Apart from this constraint, you are free to set it up in any way that you wish.
- File documents for each R&D project in a clear and structured way.
- Ensure that all documents are given a date and an author.
- Prepare brief summaries at regular intervals.
- Keep all documents coming forth from every phase of the project. The end result is not the only important part!
- Make sure to record your R&D hours within 10 working days.
- Ensure that the project administration is completed within 2 months after the end of every quarterly period.
- The administration of costs and expenditures must be fully updated and completed at the time that you submit your statement.
- Retain your R&D administrative records for at least 7 years.
How subsidAI can help with WBSO compliance requests?
subsidAI’s compliance tool has been developed with the following painpoint solutions in mind:
| Customer Painpoint | How subsidAI solves this problem? |
|---|---|
| The administrative records are incomplete, imperfect or not present. | subsidAI’s uses it in-house team of experts coupled with automated reminders to ensure timely and proper administrative records. |
| Records of the R&D Hours/Actual Costs are not kept per person, per day and per project. | subsidAI’s automation tool allows for individualistic compliance-keeping in accordance with the RVO’s recommendations. Inconsistencies are flagged. |
| The work carried out is not in agreement with the projects approved by RVO. Costs and expenditures have been included in the R&D administrative records which were not requested and approved. | Whilst it is the responsibility of our clients to ensure accurate project compliance, subsidAI has human-in-the-loop to reduce audit risks. If it appears that new R&D is taking place, an update to the WBSO will be requested. |
| Tracking R&D deliverables on different software platforms | subsidAI integrates with Gitlab, Jira and other software/productivity tools to ensure your deliverables can be tracked on one central platform. |
| Tracking R&D deliverables are time/resource inefficient | subsidAI’s compliance tool has been validated with our current clientbase. What used to take hours, now takes minutes. |
Conclusion
Do you want to experience for yourself how subsidAI works? Then schedule a free demo and find out how you can submit a professional WBSO application in less than 4 hours. Because let’s face it: your time is too valuable to waste on complicated paperwork. Let AI do the heavy lifting so you can focus on what you do best—building innovative software.
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