Advance Assurance Document Checklist
Everything an SEIS advance assurance application needs, as a checklist you can clear in an afternoon.
In this article
The advance assurance application is a compilation exercise, and this advance assurance checklist is the compilation list. Clear every line of the advance assurance checklist before you file and the application becomes an afternoon; the reasoning behind each item lives in the full assurance guide.
Company basics
- Company number, UTR, registered and trading addresses
- Date of first commercial sale, with the evidence behind it
- Current FTE headcount schedule
- Gross assets snapshot, dated
- Grant and state aid history against the £250,000 cap
The commercial story
- Business plan describing the trade as it will actually operate
- Financial forecasts that agree with the plan and the deck
- The pitch deck, if investors will see one
- Latest accounts, if any exist
Structure and the raise
- Articles of association and any shareholders’ agreement
- Current cap table including options and ASAs
- Amount to be raised and the share class proposed, ordinary, no preferences
- Use of funds, line by line, mapped to the qualifying trade
- Named likely investors, or the platform or network you will raise through
The consistency pass
- Every number appears identically in every document
- The trade description matches across plan, deck and application
- Nothing in the spend plan reads as an excluded activity
- The application answers the awkward facts rather than hiding them
Filed with all four sections clean, most applications return in a few weeks. Anything ambiguous on this list is the item to take to an adviser first, and the wider round preparation continues in the document pack.
How to use this advance assurance checklist
Run it twice: once when the raise becomes a plan, so the gaps surface while they are cheap, and again the week before filing, from documents rather than memory. Anything you cannot evidence in five minutes is the item to resolve first; anything ambiguous, an acquired trade, a grant history, a novel instrument, is the professional hour that saves the application. Founders who clear this list before opening investor conversations discover the data room is already half-built.
The three most-missed advance assurance checklist lines
From files we have seen discussed: the first-commercial-sale date, answered from incorporation instead of invoices; the state aid tally, forgotten entirely until the £250,000 arithmetic fails; and named investors, left vague in speculative applications HMRC declines to consider. Clear those three deliberately and the rest of the list usually follows.
