grandad wrote:
Lockdown did not start until 23rg March 2020. it would depend when your tax year ended. ours is March 31st but some people run different tax years. we started to see a downturn in trade from the start of March 2020. Up until then we were seeing an increase in revenue from the same period in 2019.
Indeed, I maybe shouldn't have used the word 'lockdown' in the strict sense but, for example, things here had largely closed down well before the official lockdown date, particularly as we're very dependent on the university at that time of year, and I think students had been advised to go home early March.
And I think our early part of the year had been disrupted because of Covid, since we're very dependent on people travelling internationally, but that was subdued even from January, I think, because of Covid. Of course, at that time we thought it was more of a Sars/bird flu type thing that wouldn't have quite the impact that it had, but it certainly did seem to dampen the tourism/travel market early in the year, at least as I recall it now.
Anyway, not that it had a huge impact until March or so, and not that there's much in the way of tourism here in February/March anyway. At that time it's mainly students here, but usually get one or two non-students per shift. But I recall, around February, three shifts in a row when it was 100% students, which I put down to Covid and the effect on travel etc, but of course didn't realise the enormity of it all at that time.
But you're right in that its impact on profits wouldn't be particularly significant for the 2019/20 tax year, and even less significant as regards including that tax year in the latest SEISS grant calculations, because it's an average over four years, so a few weeks impact at the end isn't going to make a huge difference.
In fact, for many it won't impact on the grant at all - my year end is 30 November 2019, thus before Covid was even discovered in Wuhan.
And, obviously, the latest anyone's figures could end for that tax year would be 5 April 2020, so just a couple of weeks of proper lockdown at worst, so not a huge deal over one year, never mind the four years considered for the SEISS grants.