When Notion’s engineering organization expanded rapidly, the number of R&D projects included in the company’s tax credit study increased from 24 projects to 87 in a single year.
Scaling the documentation process without disrupting engineering teams became a priority.
By implementing Neo.Tax’s data-driven R&D platform, Notion was able to streamline the traditionally manual credit documentation process while strengthening the underlying substantiation.
The Challenge: Rapid Growth in Engineering Activity
Notion’s continued investment in product development meant the number of qualifying R&D initiatives grew significantly year over year.
In 2024, the company’s R&D credit study included 24 projects. By 2025, that number had increased to 87 projects.
Historically, the R&D study followed a structured but manual process:
- Reviewing prior-year project
- Identifying new development initiatives
- Interviewing project managers and subject matter experts
- Asking engineers to complete time allocation surveys
“We have a lot of the information in our internal documentation systems,” says Katya Ewing, Head of Tax at Notion. “But that information exists across multiple engineering tools, and translating it into R&D credit support historically required significant manual coordination.”
With the number of projects more than tripling, the traditional approach would have required 30+ interviews with engineering leads and project managers across the organization.
At the same time, IRS expectations for data-backed substantiation of R&D claims have continued to increase.
Katya needed a process that could scale alongside Notion’s engineering organization while strengthening the documentation behind the credit.
“Engineers are busy building products. My goal was to produce a defensible R&D credit while minimizing disruption to the teams doing the work. You delivered exactly what we needed.”
The Neo.Tax Solution: Using Engineering Data to Automate Project Identification
Katya began exploring ways to leverage the company’s engineering data to streamline the R&D documentation process. The Big Four firm engaged to calculate Notion’s credit first analyzed the company’s source code management (SCM) system, but were able to extract only about half of the relevant signals.
Katya then asked Neo.Tax to analyze the same dataset.
Neo.Tax’s platform used engineering activity data to identify and organize 82 of the company’s 87 R&D projects directly from GitHub activity. The remaining five projects were associated with teams using a different internal system outside the company's SCM.
The result was a dramatically simplified workflow. Instead of conducting dozens of interviews across engineering teams, the tax team needed just a handful of targeted conversations to validate edge cases. “Using Neo.Tax reduced time and disruption to engineering and finance by streamlining and modernizing the historically manual R&D process,” Katya says.
Overall, the process reduced expected interviews by approximately 60% while saving more than 20 hours of engineering time.
Independent Review
Once the R&D study was complete, Katya shared the outputs with Notion’s Big Four advisor, who upon their review of the methodology, signed off on the Neo.Tax analysis.
“There’s still value in having a Big Four firm involved in the process,” Katya says. “But the underlying analysis felt more precise because it was built directly from engineering data.”
The Big Four team ultimately handled a limited remainder of projects outside GitHub, which required manual follow-up.
The Result: A Scalable R&D Documentation Process
Neo.Tax enabled Notion to scale its R&D credit documentation alongside the rapid growth of its engineering organization. Katya set out to solve a difficult challenge: documenting three times as many R&D projects while minimizing disruption to engineering teams. And Neo.Tax made that possible.
“Engineers are busy building products,” Katya says. “My goal was to produce a defensible R&D credit while minimizing disruption to the teams doing the work. You delivered exactly what we needed.”
By analyzing development activity directly from Notion’s source code management system and engineering tickets, Neo.Tax significantly reduced the need for manual coordination and retrospective surveys. “The guesswork was removed from the analysis to a certain extent,” Katya explains. “It was based on the actual tickets, which obviously tightens the result.”
The platform’s outputs also strengthened Katya’s confidence in the documentation supporting the credit and boosted audit defensibility of the underlying R&D tax credit study. “The numbers support the story,” she says. “Because the analysis is data-driven, the documentation is much more defensible.”
The final R&D study was reviewed by Notion’s Big Four advisor, who ultimately signed off on the methodology and outputs produced by Neo.Tax. “You delivered exactly what we needed,” Katya says. “The methodology made sense to us and made sense to our Big Four firm.”
For Katya, the experience demonstrated that a modern, data-driven approach could scale with the company’s rapid growth while maintaining strong documentation standards. “You worked hard and effectively and responded quickly when we had questions,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to do another R&D filing without Neo.Tax.”
