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5th Grant Turnover Checker

It is located in Box 9 of the self-employment short section of your tax returns.

• Turnover includes takings, fees, sales or money earned by your business.
• It does NOT include any coronavirus support payments, eg, previous SEISS grants, "Eat Out to Help Out" payments, local authority or devolved administration grants.
• To find your figures, you may need to refer to your self-assessment tax return (if you have completed it), ask your accountant or tax adviser (if you have one), check the accounting software you use for your business, go through your bookkeeping or spreadsheet records that cover their self-employment invoices and payments received, or check the bank account you use for your business to account for the money coming in from customers.
• Once you’ve found your figures, you should add them all together to work out your turnover for the 12 months.

• You'll need to compare this to a year before the pandemic - in most cases will be 2019/20. If 19/20 was not a normal year for your business (ie you were on maternity leave etc), you can use your reported turnover from 2018/19 instead.
• This figure is on your tax return, it is located in Box 9 of the self-employment short section of your tax returns.

You can find previous years' tax returns by logging in to your Self-assessment account; checking your business records or asking your accountant if you have one.

• You must reasonably believe there will be a significant reduction in your trading profits. This must be due to reduced business activity, capacity, demand or inability to trade due to coronavirus from May to September. You'll need to be able to make a declaration to this effect. In practice, to be able to make the declaration:
  1. Your business must continue to be affected by Covid in the claim period, or be newly affected at this time. Your business must have been facing an ongoing hit from coronavirus from the beginning of May to 30 September, or have been newly affected in this period. So you cannot apply if your business was struggling in, say, February, March and April but was no longer affected from May onwards. You also cannot apply if the only impact was increased costs.
  2. You need to believe the impact during this period WILL cause a 'significant reduction' in trading profits. For many, this will be straightforward, but others might not yet be sure. If this is you, you might need to wait until you have a "reasonable belief" that your trading profits are going to be significantly reduced before you know if you can make a claim.
  3. This 'significant reduction' must be due to 'reduced demand, activity or capacity' OR being temporarily unable to trade. For example:
     • Lower demand, activity or capacity could be fewer customers, cancelled contracts or supply chain issues.- Being temporarily unable to trade could be because of a local lockdown, being officially told to shield/self-isolate or parental or caring responsibilities

While receiving a SEISS grant in the past isn't an automatic reason for mortgage rejection, sadly some have been told it is evidence of business viability problems (as by applying you declared you needed help) and have been rejected.

Though receiving an earlier grant but not a later one can sometimes be viewed as evidence of a turnaround.

For those still receiving SEISS grants, of the 13 lenders we asked, six explicitly said they don't take money received from a SEISS grant into account, while only two said they would - the rest were vague. There are no hard and fast rules.

As for whether those who are eligible, and struggling, should still apply for SEISS 5 when it comes out, my view is if you need the cash, do it - mortgage savings are usually no substitute for direct cash being paid into your account.

For those struggling to get a mortgage due to these schemes, product transfers from your existing lender, and using mortgage brokers, are the best routes to navigate through this.