Swanson Reed | Specialist R&D Advisors Reviews & Provider Details

as a design director, i admire the way that they acknowledge the fact that not all r&d is focused on back-end programming. swanson reed appreciates the complexity of designing software applications through technical experiments. they have excellent customer service and offered us advisors who had an understanding of the process of iterative design sprints. their product makes it easy for us to onboard our creative leaders since they don't need prior knowledge of tax laws to participate in the service. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

the only drawback that stands out is the manual process of connecting our design files and figma/jira to their system. if they integrated with other digital product management tools and automatically collected logs from there, then ease of implementation would be significantly higher. currently, it's quite basic, so we have to put some extra effort into it ourselves. also, from a design standpoint, their user interface can certainly use improvement since this is a fairly high-use tool for us during busy times. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Being a senior frontend engineer, I can appreciate that Swanson Reed understands how complicated it is to develop an interactive demonstration environment. In addition to being on the surface, they ask questions regarding architecture, state management, and component rendering. They have well-informed customer support that helps in connecting the dots between our sprints' technical milestones and tax eligibility. The ease of use of their scope of work ensured that I did not spend unnecessary time on developing the inputs they required from my side. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The first thing that comes to mind is that they make us map our Jira ticket or GitHub documentation to their report. The ease of integration will be higher if they have some kind of developer tool hook that can fetch technical logs. Currently, their ease of integration is quite basic in the sense that we have to make some modifications in data to input into their system. Moreover, once you get accustomed to using their UI dashboard, it becomes old-fashioned. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

what strikes me most is their proficiency at finding technical R&D in web projects that we might miss otherwise. being a senior website strategist i am used to complicated custom solutions and swanson reed is very good at pointing out what qualifies as an R&D investment in our web development projects. the level of customer support they provide is very quick and efficient and the way they describe technical requirements is very clear and helpful in writing up documentation. overall the ease of use in our first discovery calls was greatly beneficial. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

basically the only complaint i have is the necessity to manually record the information regarding developer logins and milestone achievements. the ease of integration would certainly increase if there were a more efficient way to gather this data and automate synchronization with our internal project management platforms. unfortunately ease of integration is rather poor thus leaving us with additional paperwork. besides ease of use on their report portal interface is pretty bad because of lack of frequent updates. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

what i appreciate most is their ability to recognize r&d activities from the design and prototyping stage of our mobile apps. as a design director I value how our UI/UX innovations are communicated in terms of tax compliance and in this regard, swanson reed does it flawlessly. their client service department is proactive and they really try to comprehend the full cycle of our digital products development process. the user-friendliness during the first steps of project scoping exceeded what we experienced with the other R&D specialists we consulted. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

the only drawback is that there is some manual intervention needed to connect the dots between our design sprints and asset storage systems to swanson reed platform. in fact, the easiness of the process could be improved if they introduced some plugin integration for the tools we use to develop our software products. right now, the ease of use score for their platform remains relatively low due to this reason. moreover, since we use their dashboard infrequently, the user experience is not optimal. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

what I like most is the way that they get creative technology, since as a post creative strategist I deal with many innovative advertising formats and Swanson Reed helps us easily identify which of our experimental digital initiatives may qualify for tax credits. They have amazing customer support and help us translate our creative process into technical information needed for tax authorities. The ease of use of their portal has been a nice surprise to me as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

sometimes it takes a while for us to provide them with all the project assets and time logs, as it is not an instant process. The ease of implementation would be much better if they had a feature allowing for integration with our creative workflow tools. The current ease of integration is still quite manual and requires uploading all materials, and the frequency of use is high only once per year during tax season, making their interface seem outdated compared to our creative tools. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

the thing that impressed me most was the way their advisors really know how software architecture works. since i'm the director of engineering, i just don't have the time to explain what i mean by a demo sandbox or an api integration, but they got it. their service has been direct in the sense that we haven't had any wasted time with unnecessary meetings. the ease of use for their technical interview process worked well, considering they understood where our sprints counted towards r&d. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only irritating part is how the manual export of all jira logs and project history is necessary for their audit files. It would be much improved if implementation speed was more rapid by having a direct connector to our dev tools. At present moment, the exchange of files between us via mails has become much back and forth. You have to to sort out a lot of configuration yourself to get this working. Because they do not use the dashboard as often, a somewhat dated UI isn’t a dealbreaker per se but still noticeable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The greatest feature of this company is its technical expertise in determining r&d tax credits for digital marketing and performance advertising software. Being an executive in human resources management, I appreciate the amount of effort that our developers put into creating customized lead generation systems, and Swanson Reed ensures that the entire process of getting r&d credits is effortless. Their customer service is exceptional, and they have extensive knowledge of the technology stack used in our marketing campaign without over-explaining everything to them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The biggest negative aspect is that there is a lot of paperwork required at the beginning of the contract to demonstrate the lack of knowledge of the technical aspect of the situation. It requires coordination with HR and engineering internally to get the payroll data and project tracking data. That can definitely be made easier. I would like the solution to be easier to integrate with our existing HR software and project management tool without having to upload everything manually. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

the best thing is that we have access to outstanding customer support during our mapping process for our enterprise software projects in order to claim tax credits. as a sales manager, I recognize the complexity of our development processes and their expertise is unparalleled in knowing which items qualify, without us having to explain our technical infrastructure all over again. The simplicity of their model is excellent since they cut to the chase, which is saving a tremendous amount of time for our engineers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

the only negative aspect is how easy it is to implement in terms of data collection during the first stage. the process is very document-heavy and requires a lot of organization in order to gather the information contained in our jira and sprint records. i would like them to improve integration with our other tools and systems that will help automate this step, rather than requiring manual work. also the use of their portal could be increased if it were a little more up-to-date. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

what i like most is their knowledge of the it industry. being a software company that offers custom software development and qa testing services, we have a lot of technical staff and projects. swanson reed knows exactly how to look at our software engineering process and identify where tax credits can be achieved. they are also very easy to communicate with and do not require us to explain the basics of software development. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

the only negative is the amount of initial documentation that is required to get the process started. it can be a little time-consuming to get all of the data from our projects ready to go. it would be great if there was a little more streamlining of the initial data collection process, but their team was always available to assist us with this. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The thing i like most is that they have a very good understanding of the technical side of software development. As someone in presales engineering i appreciate that their specialists can look at our technical documentation and immediately understand which parts of our web and mobile projects qualify for tax credits. This saves us a lot of time because we don't have to explain basic it concepts to them. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes the initial data collection and the sheer amount of paperwork can be a bit overwhelming especially at the start of a new claim year. it would be helpful if the portal had a more simplified checklist for the initial submission phase, but their team is usually quick to answer any questions we have. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.