When to self-submit, when to get help

The Playbook equips you. The decision is still yours.

If you have read this far, you can write a stronger SEIS or EIS advance assurance application than most founders submit. The question this section answers is not whether you are capable of doing it yourself – you are. The question is whether you should.

There are two honest reasons to consider professional submission, and they do not cancel each other out. The first is the case complexity itself. Some applications are genuinely straightforward, and a self-prepared submission that follows the Sections II to V process will be approved on the merits. Most applications are not in that category – there is a wrinkle somewhere, the kind covered in Section VI or something close to it – and the cost of getting the wrinkle wrong, in refusal time and in the founder's bandwidth, outweighs the cost of the professional review.

The second reason is the audience. The advance assurance certificate is addressed to HMRC, but the people who actually read it are the investors deciding whether to put money into the round. A clean application with a professionally drafted covering letter on letterhead, approved on first submission, reads to a sophisticated investor as a different signal from a self-submitted application that was approved after one or two rounds of back-and-forth with the caseworker. The certificate is technically the same in both cases. The reading is not.

A case is straightforward enough to self-submit when all of the following are true. Each is the inverse of an edge case treated in Section VI; if you have spent real time in those pages, your case is probably not in the list below.

If your case ticks all six of these technical criteria, self-submission via the Playbook route is technically defensible. The Playbook is designed to take you the rest of the way. If even one is ambiguous – a side stream you are not sure about, a SAFE on the cap table, a recent restructure, a property element to the business – the professional route is the more honest path, regardless of how much of the Playbook you have absorbed. If you have found yourself reading Section VI carefully rather than skimming it, you are probably already past the heuristics.

Beyond the technical criteria above, there is a commercial test the Playbook route does not pass. The HMRC certificate is identical regardless of who prepared the application, but investors do not read it that way. A founder using the SEIS3 certificate to close a round is often asked, during diligence, who advised on the advance assurance. Sophisticated investors – angel syndicates, EIS funds, family offices, institutional seed funds – treat a professionally-signed application as a baseline. A self-prepared application can land differently, particularly in larger or institutional rounds where the application is read alongside articles of association and share rights. If the round you are raising into expects professional involvement, the Seisly Advisers route below is what pays back in investor confidence, not just HMRC outcome.

Three honest routes, not a ladder. These aren't a progression from cheap to premium – they're three different routes, each suited to a different case. Pick the one that matches yours, not the one above or below it.