Azets is sponsoring Knowledge Exchange Heroes (team & individual) in the Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards 2025. Here, Gemma Monaghan, R&D Tax Partner, outlines some of the areas where Azets are supporting businesses, allowing them to grow.

At Azets, we are passionate about supporting Scottish SME businesses innovate and grow, and love working with clients through their start-up and scale-up journeys, through to potential sale. Working closely with the banking, legal and investment bodies across Scotland, we are all too aware of the complexity businesses’ face at different stages of their evolution and the myriads of challenges they need to address.

Our aim is to provide a joined up advisory service for clients, to help them succeed in their ambitions, and there are some of our services that are critical for innovative businesses in their journey to success. We want to take the load off companies and let our specialists to their thing, so they can continue to focus on their value add

• Research and Development (‘R&D’) tax relief, rewarding and incentivising innovation. It’s been disappointing to see SMEs hit with reduced benefit, and with increased complexity and scrutiny, some businesses may either miss out or feel it’s not worth it. We would encourage all innovating businesses to understand what qualifies, the benefit they could access and how they can access it.
• The Patent Box regime enables companies to pay corporation tax at 10 % – a huge reduction. It’s important that companies think about their overall Intellectual Property (‘IP’) strategy and how such a lucrative relief could apply to them. Collaborations between businesses and academics more than likely generate Intellectual Assets, so its important there is clarity in the collaboration.
• Creative reliefs, such as Video Games Tax Relief (‘VGTR’), supporting UK-based games’ developers, which are becoming increasingly attractive.
• Grant funding application and reporting support.
• Research and Development Allowances (‘RDAs’) and capital allowance relief planning to maximise relief on capital items.
• Share option scheme and Enterprise Investment Scheme (‘EIS’), involving helping companies get advance assurance and working with the angel networks.
• Compliance services, such as accounts preparation and tax computations.

Without the collaboration of academia and industry, we wouldn’t have such a thriving innovative SME community in Scotland. We believe Scotland will only achieve its goals of being one of the most innovative small nations, by supporting this collaboration further and ensuring that the advisor community that supports the wider Ecosystem is informed and proactive.