SEIS and EIS advance assurance
Sometimes, yes. HMRC charges nothing to apply, the form is not complicated and you can use ChatGPT or Claude to help you fill it in. But the form is the easy part, and most founders cannot tell in advance which side of the line they are on.
HMRC charges nothing to apply for advance assurance. The application itself is short, and for a company that clearly qualifies, a founder can file it without help.
If your company plainly qualifies and you are comfortable with the judgement involved, self-filing can work. The point of this page is not that doing it yourself never works. It is that the attractive part, free and short, hides where the risk actually lives.
The hard part is judgement. Whether your trade qualifies. Whether any of your activity is wholly or partly excluded. Whether the risk-to-capital condition is met, and whether you can evidence it credibly. How you frame the use of funds. How your share structure and any connected-party position read to a caseworker who has never met you.
The limits also interact. For SEIS, there is a lifetime cap of £250,000, gross assets of no more than £350,000, fewer than 3 years of trading and no more than 25 full-time equivalent employees. EIS has its own separate thresholds. And where SEIS is taken, it comes before EIS. A founder rarely knows which of these bites until it does.
The feature that disqualifies a company is usually the one the founder did not think to check: a point in the cap table, a partly excluded trade, thin risk-to-capital framing. A practitioner is paid to find it before HMRC does.
An investor deck sells low risk, asset backing, predictable returns and a clean exit. The risk-to-capital condition needs the reverse: a genuine risk of loss and a long-term growth intent. The document that wins the investor can sink the assurance.
Phrases that are routine in a deck, such as guaranteed returns, capital protection and a pre-planned sale, are quietly fatal in an application. Founders rarely see the conflict, because both documents feel true to them. Reconciling the two stories, and removing the language that disqualifies, is part of a practitioner's job.
See the five slides where applications fail on language or read the full red-flag language chapter.
The real value sits before you submit: share classes and rights, the order and timing of share issues, SEIS before EIS, and no pre-arranged exit or other disqualifying arrangement.
Caught before shares are issued, a problem is a fix. Caught after, it can be permanent, because a share issue cannot be un-issued. A founder moving fast in the middle of a raise can do damage that no later submission can undo. Self-filing tends to surface the problem once it is already baked in.
A weak or wrong application does not just cost a resubmission. It costs time at the worst moment, when a round is live and investors are waiting on the assurance. A correctly framed, well-evidenced application is also a faster one, because caseworkers respond better to a credible submission.
And advance assurance is only step one. Getting the qualifying position right at the start is what protects your investor's relief later: the compliance statements, the holding period, the maintenance of qualifying status. Assurance granted on a shaky basis is a problem deferred. The person who pays for it later is the investor whose relief is withdrawn, with your name attached.
Set against the relief at stake, the size of the round and your own time, the cost of expert help is small.
HMRC's advance assurance is conditional on its face. The wording is:
“On the basis of the information you have provided, we believe we will be able to authorise the company to issue compliance certificates.”
That is a belief, resting on the information submitted, about a future authorisation. It is not a guarantee, and it does not grant relief.
So the assurance is only ever as good as the submission behind it. If the facts were framed wrongly, or something disqualifying was not surfaced, the assurance papers over it rather than catching it. The gap then surfaces at the compliance-certificate stage, when it is the investor's relief at risk.
A self-filed assurance and a practitioner-prepared one look identical on the HMRC letter, but they carry different risk, and the investor cannot see the working. The practitioner's involvement is the proxy for the working being sound. It tells the investor that the conditional opinion rests on facts someone qualified has tested, not merely asserted.
For some rounds this is a gate, not a preference. Leads, syndicates and EIS funds increasingly run their own tax due diligence on qualifying status, and a self-filed letter can fail it.
The expensive part of getting expert help has always been the bespoke advisory fee, which is why so many founders skip it.
At Seisly, the application is reviewed and prepared by a qualified practitioner, rather than being a template you complete alone. That is the safeguard described above, without the open-ended advisory engagement.
The first step is a free thirty-minute diagnostic conversation. It is a diagnosis, not a pitch: you find out whether your raise has a problem before you submit anything.