The full answer
What actually decides it.
Often not, but it is not automatic and it depends on the lender reading the accounts.
Large one-off costs turn up in a practice’s accounts for all sorts of ordinary reasons – specialist machinery, a vehicle, a significant piece of training. They reduce the profit figure for the year they land in, and the profit figure is what a lender lends against, so on paper a good year can look like a poor one.
What a well-chosen lender does is see through that. It recognises that a cost which will not recur says nothing about the long-term profitability of the practice or about your income prospects, and it underwrites the business as it actually is rather than as one year’s bottom line describes it.
The thing that makes that possible is evidence. What the cost was, when it was incurred and how it was funded, supported by your accounts and ideally by your accountant confirming it was a one-off. Without that, a lender has only the number, and the number looks like a fall in profitability.
It is worth raising at the outset rather than waiting to be asked. A one-off explained up front is a routine underwriting point. The same figure queried halfway through an application is the sort of thing that costs weeks.
Where lenders differ
- Two camps. Some lenders will not look past the profit number at all. They will either average your last two years or take the latest year, and either way the cost drags your borrowing down.
- Others take a more pragmatic view and will accept that the item can be excluded, assessing you on the underlying position instead.
- Lenders exercising that flexibility are frequently not high street names and will often charge slightly more than a high street lender would. Whether that is worth paying depends on how much the excluded cost is worth to your borrowing figure.
Written from Colin Wallace’s typed answers of 24 August 2026 and reviewed by Colin Wallace.