Do You Actually Need to Pay for Advance Assurance?

Advance assurance is an expensive and complicated process and requires specialist help — that's a dangerous assumption many founders carry. But that just isn't true for the majority of early stage cap tables in the UK. So your real question should be "at what point does paying become worth it", not "should I pay."

Advance assurance is HMRC's pre-approval that your company likely qualifies for SEIS/EIS. It isn't a legal requirement, but the majority of UK investors do ask for proof and won't invest without it. The approval rates are 85% for SEIS and 76% for EIS, showing that it isn't difficult and nothing daunting.

What the DIY process involves

Applying for advance assurance isn't rocket science and actually disproves many assumptions about applying for government schemes. It really only involves:

• A short business plan
• Pitch deck (around 10 slides)
• Financial forecast
• One named prospective investor
• A risk-to-capital memo explaining growth plans rather than risk-reduction

After supplying this information to HMRC, you'll likely get a turnaround within 4-8 weeks, depending on the scheme you're applying to and how complete your submission is. This entire process is done on HMRC's online government gateway, entirely free, and includes very helpful guidance. There is nothing complicated about it.

If your cap table is simple, one or two investors, a straightforward SEIS raise, there is genuinely no reason to pay someone else to fill in a form you can fill in yourself.

What it actually costs if you do pay

• SeedLegals: £499 for the advance assurance itself, but gated behind a subscription (£649/yr Access minimum, or £79/month) — cheapest realistic route around £578-£1,148/year
• Seisly: standalone advance assurance from £99, no subscription required
• A solicitor or accountant doing it manually: typically £1,000-£2,500, billed hourly
• FounderCatalyst: £1,199/yr membership including one AA, or £1,450 ex VAT as a standalone product

The range is enormous, £99 to £2,500 for functionally the same document, and most of that spread is about how many other things you're buying alongside it, to pull you into their ecosystem, not the actual difficulty of the task. Fundamentally, a lot of these services use a boilerplate template adapted to your company. Since they've filed hundreds of advance assurance applications, they know exactly what HMRC's minimum bar is for a successful outcome with the lowest possible input.

Where it stops being a DIY job

Being blunt, advance assurance is the easy half. The really tedious part is the compliance statement after the round closes, because every single one of your investors needs their own SEIS3/EIS3 certificate issued against them specifically.

Picture this: two investors writing cheques is a Tuesday afternoon of admin. Eight or ten smaller angels, each needing their own certificate, their own details correctly submitted, their own correspondence thread if HMRC has a query about one of them specifically, that is more than just a weekend of pain and misery.

That is the point where paying for a platform or an advisor starts to earn its cost, not because the individual task got harder, but because the task multiplied by your investor count.

Generally, it's a good rule of thumb: somewhere around 5+ investors on a single round is roughly where your admin tips from an "annoying afternoon" to "worth paying someone to own it."

So the whole decision really comes down to one number, your investor count, not any fear of the process itself.

Now of course, RoundRaise does offer advance assurance support, but it's always included in our platform, free or paid, and it's a small piece of what we do, something pulled directly from the data already in your data room and cap table.

You could sign up just to fill in your advance assurance and leave. But seriously, advance assurance isn't rocket science, and it's probably the lowest effort thing you could do to help your raise.