Case Study: Top-10 Biotech Corporation Recovers 15% of R&D Costs
One of the world’s leading biotechnology firms’ latest financial results demonstrate revenue growth topping $50 billion and reaffirm long-term expansion plans. Among the business units driving these results is the R&D division. The organization’s 2024 annual results show an ongoing commitment to innovation, including over $20 billion in global net revenues across one leading portfolio, double-digit growth in certain pipeline segments, and continued investment in acquisitions and clinical research across key therapeutic areas.
But the R&D group faced a variety of challenges:
- Incomplete recovery of innovation incentives due to lack of visibility into R&D time.
- Inconsistent reporting of hours across affiliates led to unclear global cost tracking.
- Inaccurate forecasting based on antiquated methods, resulting in high administrative overhead.
By solving the visibility problem, the R&D group improved financial accountability, streamlined reporting, and strengthened long-term planning, contributing directly to their annual outcomes:
- Recovered 15% of research employee costs, exceeding targets.
- Facilitated internal chargebacks to global organization for 1500 hours of work per researcher annually.
- Established 6-month forecasts to prevent budget overruns and staff burnout.
Maximized R&D Tax Credit Claims
By capturing every qualifying hour in real time, the R&D group recovered 15% of research employee costs, exceeding previous benchmarks. Automated time tracking eliminated tedious manual effort, ensuring compliance without the administrative burden. Instead of sifting through spreadsheets to retroactively sort and categorize data, the team accurately captured and accredited every eligible research hour from the start—unlocking greater tax savings with less effort.
“We've been using ClickTime for several years to track hours across all studies, whether they qualify for tax credits or not. It serves both as a resource management tool and a critical component of our tax credit reporting process.”
Enhanced Cost Recovery
Streamlined cost categorization enabled the team to bill its global corporation for approximately 1,500 hours per researcher last year. Advancing chemical compound development is essential to the company’s intellectual property portfolio. To ensure accurate cost tracking and ROI reporting, the R&D team applies fully burdened cost rates to recorded hours, improving internal billing accuracy and reducing chargeback errors.
“One of the key functionalities we built within ClickTime is the ability to link every recorded hour to a specific product, which in turn is linked to a compound. When this data reaches our global team, all affiliates report in the same format, providing a clear, standardized view of hours worked per compound at a global level.”
More Accurate Forecasting
Global leadership is committed to a high single-digit revenue growth rate through the next five years. Time tracking and resource planning support this aggressive goal by preventing budget overruns and slipped timelines. Improving the data on effort per compound allowed the division’s leadership to analyze how the allocated hours for each team corresponded to their actual hours. The results they’re seeing now inform headcount and project planning for the next quarter, and even the next year.
Contribution to Overall Growth
Every division’s efficiency gains funneled into the company’s reported revenue growth over 2024. These same improvements are crucial building blocks in the organization’s 4% year-over-year growth targets over the next five years.
As the organization continues to innovate, data-driven resource and cost management practices exemplify how a disciplined approach to time tracking can underpin both near-term financial performance and long-term strategic growth.
