Everything you need to know about how Change Captain works, how we save you money, and how we keep you audit-ready.
Change Captain runs quietly in the background integrating with your code repository, ticketing system, and payroll. Unlike other tools, it doesn’t rely on story points or estimates. As IRS scrutiny increased in 2025, companies can no longer depend on vague projections to claim credits. Change Captain meets these stricter standards by pulling actual data from your codebase, tracking who did the work, when, and how long it took. It then connects that to wage data to automatically determine what qualifies, giving you everything you need to maximize your savings, fully automated and fully audit-ready.
Get access to the entire Change Captain platform for roughly 15% of the tax savings we are able to get you and an average of a 45x ROI. Check out our pricing page to learn more.
Yes, however, there are limits.
R&D Tax Credits:
You can usually claim credits in the country where the work is performed. For example, in the United States, you cannot claim credits for R&D performed outside the U.S. In Canada, up to 10% of your credits can come from international work performed abroad. Beyond that, Change Captain can also help you secure credits in the country where the development occurs — so if part of your team is in India, we can help you maximize savings through India’s incentives as well.
Tax Amortization:
You can generally receive the full benefit of tax amortization in most countries—though the specific rules differ by jurisdiction.
For example, in the United States, recent tax reform allows immediate expensing of domestic R&D costs incurred after December 31, 2024, under Section 174A. However, R&D performed abroad must still be amortized over 15 years.
Each country sets its own amortization timelines. Change Captain automatically applies the correct treatment for your development location, ensuring compliance and maximizing your tax savings.
Not at all. Change Captain complements your CPA, it doesn’t replace them. We automate one (very valuable) part of the tax return: identifying and substantiating R&D tax credits and tax amortization. Your CPA still prepares and files the return.
Change Captain also supports financial reporting by automating Cap Labor tracking for GAAP and IFRS. For compliance-focused audits, we move beyond traditional sampling. Today, auditors often detect issues only after something goes wrong, resulting in failed audits or costly remediation. Change Captain changes that by enforcing preventative controls on every code change, ensuring testing, approvals, and segregation of duties happen before deployment.
Rather than reviewing 25 samples from a population of millions after the fact, auditors get full population coverage, real-time assurance, and built-in defensibility preventing failures before they happen.
Change Captain integrates with your code repository putting in place three core controls to ensure all code must be approved, tested, with enforced segregation of duties before the code can be deployed. Effectively Change Captain is enforcing your polices to ensure the change management process flow follows best practices every time with no ability for even an Admin to circumvent or override these controls.
No problem! Change Captain’s compliance features are optional and can be turned off. You’ll still receive powerful tax savings through automated R&D credits and amortization.
However, keep in mind that disabling compliance may limit how much savings we can capture. Without visibility into testing and approvals, we can’t track all the effort involved—meaning some eligible time (and money) may go unclaimed.
Change Captain supports audits that involve the software development lifecycle (SDLC)—a critical component of many regulatory frameworks. This includes audits for SOC, SOX, CCPA, GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, HITRUST, and FedRAMP, among others, due to the inherent risks software introduces.
Note: Change Captain is not a code scanning tool like GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS), SonarQube, or Snyk. Instead, it enforces best practices around the change management process flow ensuring code changes follow required testing, approvals, and segregation of duties to meet regulatory standards and reduce the risk of deploying bad code.
Change Captain’s enforced segregation of duties makes it so no one person holds keys to the kingdom as the person who develops the code must be different from the approver and the tester. As a result, a bad actor would need to breach multiple code repository accounts and multiple Change Captain accounts to inject malicous code.
Through evidence of due diligence, Change Captain can show you did everything reasonably possible to prevent an outage by demonstrating that the code change went through all necessary approvals and testing by different individuals before the developer’s code was deployed.
Absolutely. We provide exportable, audit-ready reports that demonstrate strong software controls, capitalized labor, and available tax savings. This can help improve valuation and reduce risk during investor or acquirer reviews.
No — Change Captain never looks at your code. Your code stays entirely yours, and your intellectual property remains protected. We are not a code scanning tool like GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS), SonarQube, or Snyk. Change Captain has no idea what your code is — and that’s by design.
Instead, we only track the actions around your software development lifecycle to generate audit-ready evidence, satisfy regulatory requirements, and capture the data needed to automate tax savings and cap labor reporting.
The process is nearly fully passive. In practice, Change Captain reduces admin work overall—so your engineers spend more time coding and less time on compliance.
Change Captain can be fully connected and running in under an hour with 5 simple steps:
1. Install the Change Captain code repository app, just like you would any other app.
a. Optionally select which repositories in your environment you want to give Change Captain access to.
2. Invite your users in Change Captain and assign them access.
3. Create your Change Captain projects
Yes. Change Captain is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and designed with enterprise-grade security standards.
Yes. You have full control over what code areas Change Captain collects data on, how tax rules are applied, and what is included in your reports. Everything is configurable to your needs.
No, Change Captain gives you the ability to choose which repositories and branches you want to start with, empowering you to start small and scale up.
Currently, we support GitHub, a large list of ticketing systems like Jira, and most payroll providers. If you use a different code repository like Azure DevOps, GitLab, Bitbucket, or others just let us know your interest and we can get the integration built for you.
Yes — but only if software is being developed. Many of our customers have primary businesses that have nothing to do with software, yet they still build internal tools, customer apps, or product integrations. Change Captain captures that software development, helping them unlock millions in tax savings while staying compliant.
Today, nearly every company develops some form of software. If your team is writing code as part of your operations or products, Change Captain can help you maximize savings and reduce compliance overhead.
Change Captain isn’t a replacement for your tax accountant, we’re simply automating the data necessary for your CPA to file. One area of automation, huge ROI.
Not really. The only change is that engineers log their time on code changes directly in the repository they already use. There’s no context switching, no new tool to learn, and no extra documentation.
Change Captain is flexible enough to fit your workflow process and, in most cases, reduces the admin work developers are doing today. It runs quietly in the background—keeping developers out of Change Captain itself—so they can stay focused on what they do best: writing code.
Change Captain doesn’t track “fingers on a keyboard.” We recognize that even a small code change can require hours of research. It wouldn’t be fair to say a 10-word code change only took 45 seconds when in reality it took 6 hours to figure out how to write those 10 words.
Instead of acting like “Big Brother,” Change Captain puts developers in control. Engineers simply log their time when submitting code directly in the repository they already use, recording the true effort behind each change. This approach fairly represents work while eliminating the need for separate time-tracking tools. In most cases, Change Captain actually reduces admin work, since everything happens in the natural flow of development without extra context switching.
Yes, we show what is actually being worked on, not what stale scrum boards report. We’re based only on actual code events and actions making us your best source of truth for status. Need metrics on capacity, velocity, and other insights? Check out our Insights feature to learn more.
Understand how much time is really being spent by team, project, and more. Get actual data, based only on real events and actions. Worried your contracting firm is over charging hours? Check out the actuals driven data we can provide and much more. See our Insights page to learn more.
You can export all of your data and reports before disconnecting. Retroactive tracking is not supported due to regulatory and audit requirements. Organizations are billed based on a percentage of the tax savings Change Captain can capture for them. As a result, the customer will only be billed for the tax savings Change Captain was able to capture for the customer during the window of time it was in use.
Change Captain works for teams as small as a single developer and scales seamlessly with your business. Our pricing is percentage-based on the tax savings we capture, so it aligns with the value you receive. Smaller teams can also join our Startup Program, gaining access to the full platform at a steep discount to help them scale quickly.
Yes. While a ticketing system enhances the quality of your reports, it’s not required. Change Captain can still track changes, enforce controls, and automate tax savings based on your code repository activity alone.
Yes. Many customers use Change Captain’s reports to show software investment trends, Cap Labor impacts, audit logs, and engineering productivity. Run reports to see all the raw data or reference our Change Captain dashboard where we will to turn your data into actionable insights including visualizations to drop into board decks or share with finance teams. Remember to consult with your CPA on any financial decisions being made based on platform data.
Change Captain has a friendly AI assistant, Scout. Scout can answer all the basic FAQ and more as you get started. If you need a human, reach out to your Account Executive or the crew at info@changecaptain.co.
