You must substantiate the time spent on eligible R&D projects by your employees (that is, the researchers and technicians who carry out the R&D project).
As per ATO guidance source documents that would have satisfied the record keeping requirements in support of your claims and distinguish between eligible and ineligible R&D activities include, but are not limited to:
duty statements of your staff members
contracts or agreements with employees
time sheets,
diary entries breaking down times devoted to:
administration,
marketing,
research and development
personnel attendance at board meetings and
company administration, etc
The most accurate and effective method of allocating time is to maintain timesheets or job cards. If you don't use these methods, it may be more difficult to show that the allocation of time is accurate. It is your responsibility to make sure you keep sufficient records to support your claims.
It is not appropriate for R&D salary apportionment to be based on an estimate of time or allocating exactly the same amount of hours for the tasks each month over the year.
Records that contain non-specific details of the work undertaken are not appropriate records.
Such records would show dates of when services were performed, the length of time spent each day on those services, details of the work done and its relationship to the registered R&D activities.