Diving into Rho's Technology and R&D Tax Credit POV

For fast-scaling startups, financial clarity and compliance aren’t luxuries, they’re requirements. But many founders are still stuck juggling banking apps, spreadsheets, expense reports, and outdated workflows that drive two suboptimal outcomes: (1) wasted time working to the lowest common denominator of done and (2) a lack of financial clarity. 

Rho takes a different approach that solves these. What you get is a platform that combines banking, spend management, treasury, and integrations into a single system engineered for transparency and better decision-making.You get what you need efficiently. 

That’s exactly what we at Tax Hack look for when evaluating R&D how product development solves business problems. In that vein we ask two questions of any SaaS / tech company: 

1. How are you solving your customer’s problems?

2. How are you different from currently available off-the-shelf solutions?

And Rho answers these in a big way.  

In this post, we take a tax credit specialist’s view of the Rho platform and dive into how Rho’s tech-enabled finance stack solves these problems.

The Problem: Disjointed Finance

Startups often start scrappy: a business checking account, a personal card, a Google Sheet. But as headcount and expenses grow, the gaps in visibility grow too.

Often in early years, startups are categorizing transactions outside of an accounting platform. That can be done for a few hundred transactions easily, but gets harder as you scale to thousands. In addition, it limits your ability to reconcile your bank account transactions to your more complete financial tech stack: billing systems, payroll, and AP/AR as the amount that hits the bank is often a byproduct of multiple transactions (e.g., think processing fees or payroll taxes). 

And that’s not even considering the headaches that come with expense management and tracking expenses paid by employees. 

We also have to consider, in a fragmented system, the difficulty of sharing information across key stakeholders. That can be your bookkeeper and CFO who have finance responsibilities but also those who are looking to track the economic progress of the organization (sales, partners, advisors, and investors). Sharing a spreadsheet is going to be difficult. But if you need your CTO to tell you what subscription charges are, the chatter can become unmanageable. That would imply a workflow that looks something like: you present the transaction descriptions, CTO doesn’t know what they mean so requests invoices, you hunt down invoices then CTO responds mapping some of the vendors, you remind CTO that he also needs to do XYZ transactions, then you communicate it to the bookkeeper or CFO to update in your accounting software, etc. What we have heard is an n+1 step process that is a time drag and then needs to be done for the next period as new transactions arise. This not only raises questions about accuracy but also slows down the time to get actual financials. 

The Solution: A Unified Platform 

Rho was designed to eliminate this chaos by giving startups one platform to manage with the following features:

• Corporate banking;

• Corporate cards with real-time controls;

• Bill pay, reimbursements, and AP automation;

• Treasury for idle cash; and

• Integrations with accounting platforms like QuickBooks and NetSuite.

This single source of truth enables better forecasting, cleaner closes, and a foundation for making every dollar work harder.

It’s also what sets Rho apart in tax planning. With categorized spend data and department-level controls, teams can monitor R&D-qualified expenses all year long, not just during tax season.

The R&D credit is one of the most valuable tax benefits available to startups, but many companies wait until the year is over to calculate it.

With Rho’s real-time data and labeling, founders can:

• Forecast eligible spend by project or department

• Track cloud/hosting tools like AWS, Google Cloud, Figma, or GitHub as part of qualified costs

• Align hiring or contractor decisions with expected credits

This makes tax planning a part of monthly financial conversations, not an afterthought.

Tax Hack works with clients using Rho to build dashboards that map real-time spend to potential credits, helping teams plan more strategically.

Built for Teams, Not Just Accountants

Finance doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Product leads, operations, marketing, and outside advisors all have a stake in spending and how it’s managed.

Rho makes it easy for founders to bring the right people into the workflow:

• Role-based access means each team sees only what they need;

• Approvals and spend controls create accountability; and

• Accountants and fractional CFOs can pull reports in seconds.

This collaboration is especially helpful when preparing R&D credit filings. You’re no longer reliant on email threads or week-old spreadsheets to gather documentation.

Everyone works from the same up-to-date system.

Case Studies

In this section we evaluate the key features described above with an R&D lens. 

We begin with corporate banking. Since Rho uses established banks to power the banking, the technology is not financial, it’s UX-driven. Since this needed to be developed in a specific way based on its user feedback, this qualifies for the R&D tax credit. 

Rho has developed a seamless and customizable corporate card experience for users. With various access restrictions and integrations for a complete expense management process, this custom development qualifies for the R&D tax credit. 

Through automation, Rho designed a streamlined accounting platform to send invoices, manage vendors, and process fee-free payments. This feature was also developed with real-time capabilities, especially for the reconciliation component. Due to the complexity and need for automation/real-time data flow, this feature would qualify for the R&D tax credit. 

One of Rho’s more unique product offerings is Rho Treasury, where users can earn up to 4.26%* on idle cash. Rho developed a platform where you can easily pick investments, transfer funds from Rho accounts to Treasury accounts, and integrate these transactions to your accounting process. The seamless integrations with Rho accounts and the accounting platform qualify this feature for the R&D tax credit. 

An advantage of using Rho’s platform is that it provides integrations to 50+ leading Accounting & ERP, HR, and Travel systems in the market. Not only do these integrations involve custom development, but require the data transfer to be seamless and in real-time. Rho has automated data entry, complete with receipts, and developed custom rules to map/categorize expenses automatically. The custom development and integration here, along with the real-time and automation components, qualify this feature for the R&D tax credit. That means any time spent on development, ideating, and product specifications and testing can be used for purposes of the R&D tax credit. 

What Makes Rho Different from Traditional Tools

Plenty of fintech tools exist for spend tracking, bill pay, or accounting, but Rho is unique in combining everything under one roof, with a modern interface and scalable automation.

Here’s what stands out:

• Fast onboarding and no-code rules setup;

• Treasury integration, your idle cash earns yield without leaving the platform; and

• Everything synced, tagged, and exportable for clean financial closes and tax prep.

You don’t need to hire a 5-person finance team to adopt big-company processes. Rho gives you the playbook and the tools to do it in a few clicks.

Final Thoughts: Tech That Powers Smarter Tax Strategy

The R&D tax credit isn’t just about filing a form, it’s about understanding the product roadmap, the features, tracking qualified work, and maximizing your claim. That requires systems, visibility, and strategic guidance.

We do the same for our founders, building tax strategies side-by-side as our clients build products. Understanding the marketing takes work, and for founders, understanding how to apply these principles to leverage the R&D credit can generate a return on that investment, in dollars that offset taxes paid. To understand more about the R&D tax credit and how much money your company is leaving on the table, check out our post here. 

Join our upcoming webinar to see how Rho helps streamline the R&D tax credit process from start to finish. Live demo, expert Q&A, and real-world examples.

About Miguel

Miguel Alexander Centeno is an author, speaker, and tax leader at Tax Hack. A former Big 4 tax manager, he represents taxpayers in all matters before the IRS, including the U.S. Tax Court. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, and MSNBC on tax-related articles, and has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives as part of the hearings for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Miguel worked at PwC for six years, specializing in Specialty and International Tax with a focus on restructuring and tax efficiency projects. His client portfolio included Fortune 500 companies in Pharma, SaaS, and Retail. In 2017, he founded Tax Hack Accounting Group to bring that same strategic thinking to emerging industries such as E-Commerce, Digital Marketing Agencies, and Tech.

A father of three, an Austin FC season ticket holder, and a lover of Mexican food and tax strategy credits (in that order), Miguel can be found on weekends at the sidelines of his kids’ soccer games or out on long cycling rides.

About Tax Hack

Founded in 2017, Tax Hack was born out of a mission to bring Fortune 500-level tax strategies to businesses of all sizes. We are a strategy-first tax compliance firm that specializes in helping entrepreneurs, investors, and operators in industries such as SaaS / Software, Digital Marketing, Iot / Big Data and Manufacturing leverage tax and operational strategies for long-term success.

Our founding team consists of ex-PwC and ex-Deloitte managers who were determined to provide high-level tax solutions to businesses that typically don’t have access to such resources. Since then, we’ve grown into a diverse and distributed team, with technical and support staff across the United States, Mexico, and Vietnam. This global presence allows us to offer tailored solutions that support the unique needs of our clients, whether they’re looking for tax-efficient growth, reinvestment strategies, or help with complex tax credits.

In recognition of this growth and impact, Tax Hack was named to Inc. 's 2025 list of the Fastest-Growing Private Companies, a milestone that underscores our commitment to delivering world-class tax strategy with measurable results.