The financial requirement, in plain numbers

Almost nobody is refused a student visa for being poor. People are refused for holding the right money in the wrong way, on the wrong days, in somebody else's name. The rules are published, they are not negotiable, and they are easier to follow than to argue with afterwards.

What the figure is made of

Two numbers added together. The first is the tuition for your first year that you have not already paid - if you have paid a deposit, the receipt reduces the figure, which is one of the few levers you have. The second is living costs, set by the Home Office rather than by your landlord, at a monthly rate that is higher for London than for everywhere else, counted for up to nine months.

It does not matter that your actual rent is lower. It does not matter that a relative is housing you. The figure is the figure.

The two windows

This is where files fail, and it is worth saying slowly.

The money has to sit in an account for twenty-eight consecutive days, and the lowest balance in those twenty-eight days is the balance that counts. A transfer out on day nineteen and back on day twenty does not average out. It starts the twenty-eight days again from day twenty.

The statement you submit has to be dated no more than thirty-one days before the day you apply. Print it too early and a perfectly good file is refused on a technicality that nobody will explain to you.

Print the statement, then apply. Doing it in the other order has cost more places than any grade.

Put together, those two windows mean the sequence is: hold the money, wait twenty-eight days, print, apply inside the month. Not: apply, then gather evidence.

Whose account it can be

Your own account is simplest and needs nothing but the statement.

A parent's account is fine, and needs two more things: a document proving the relationship, and a signed letter from them consenting to the money being used for your study. Both are ordinary and both are refused when they are missing.

• An uncle, a cousin, a family friend or a sponsor who is not a parent or legal guardian is not accepted, however genuine the arrangement.
• A company account is not accepted unless the company is an official sponsor with the paperwork that goes with it.
• A loan is accepted, from a regulated institution, with the letter that proves it.

If a large sum has arrived recently from somewhere else, expect to be asked where from, and have the answer ready in writing rather than in your memory.

What we do with yours

We work out the figure from your own offer letter rather than from a table, because a deposit already paid changes it and so does the campus. Then we put the twenty-eight days on a calendar and tell you the earliest honest date you can apply.

Then we read the statement before it is submitted. Roughly one in six needs something changed - a missing account holder name, a currency conversion that does not match, a page missing from a PDF. Finding that a week early costs an afternoon. Finding it in a refusal letter costs the term.