How much revenue did a Greek business that publishes no financial statements have? The Repayable Advance tells you

Most Greek businesses do not publish their revenue. But they received the Repayable Advance, the Covid-era business support scheme in Greece, and its amount is public for each VAT number (Greek tax ID). The state calculated it from their revenue, so you can turn it back into revenue. Not exactly, but enough to know if we are talking about a shop or a factory.

The rule

Take the total Repayable Advance the business received, across all rounds, and multiply it by 15. That is, roughly, its revenue in 2019.

15 is the middle case. This is how the "times what" spreads across the 8,437 businesses for which we know both, 2019 revenue and the Repayable Advance:

Each bar is double the previous one. Most businesses are between 4 and 32, with the peak at 8 to 16. But there are some at 2 and at 256, so "times 15" on its own is rough.

For a better result, two corrections.

First, how many times it received the advance. A business that received it once got little compared with its revenue. A business that received all seven got a lot. Instead of 15, multiply by:

Second, the sector. Trade has a small margin, so it got a small advance compared with its revenue. Services and tourism the opposite. Also multiply by:

Example. A wholesale general partnership (OE) received the advance four times, €40,000 in total. 40,000 times 9 times 1.7 equals €610,000 revenue in 2019. For 2020 divide by 1.4, about €440,000.

How close you get

I tested it on 8,437 businesses for which we know their 2019 revenue, because they publish financial statements and also received the Repayable Advance.

With the full rule, rounds and sector, the real revenue is within three times above or below the estimate in 3 out of 4 businesses. Within two times above or below, in half. Within ±30%, only in 2 out of 10.

With plain "times 15", without corrections, the same limits catch 56%, 37% and 15%.

The more times a business received it, the better, because each round is one more measurement of the same business. With seven rounds, "three times above or below" catches 87 out of 100. With one round, 60.

So it tells you if it is a business of 50 thousand, 500 thousand or 5 million. It does not tell you if it is 400 or 600 thousand.

Is it worth it? Without the Repayable Advance, the best you can say about a business without financial statements is the median of all, 588 thousand, and you are within three times in 44 out of 100. With the Repayable Advance, in 73. That is the gain. It does not give you the revenue. It tells you whether you have a shop or a factory in front of you.

When you miss: when the amount is round, €2,000, €4,000, €8,000, €15,000 or €30,000. These are the minimum amounts the law gave depending on the number of employees (none, 1-5, 6-20, 21-50, more than 50). In these cases the formula gave less and the business got the minimum. So the amount tells how many employees it had, not how much it sold. This is one third of the records. I tried giving these records the median revenue of their band instead of the formula: it gains 2 to 3 points, not worth the complexity. But the band is information on its own, and the profile shows it: "minimum amount: 6-20 employees".

Where you see it

On bizlist.gr, the profile of each business that has a Repayable Advance and no financial statements shows "estimated 2019 revenue" in the "Subsidies" section, with a range from one third to three times. It is the rule above, with the corrections for rounds and sector already applied. It does not appear for businesses with financial statements, because the revenue is there. For the others, which are most of them, it is the only public sign of size.

Why it works

All seven rounds gave the same thing: the drop in revenue compared with 2019, times a rate that came from the 2019 VAT return (revenue minus purchases, divided by revenue, with a minimum of 20%), minus the compensation of employees under furlough, minus whatever the business had already received in a previous round. Big business, big drop in euros, big amount. That is why the amount carries the revenue.

And that is why it does not carry it exactly. Two businesses with the same revenue but a different drop got different amounts. The VAT rate differs from sector to sector. And the minimum amounts flatten the small ones. These are the unknowns that make the range so wide.

What each round gave

The 2nd, the 3rd, the 5th and the 7th subtracted whatever the business had received in the previous one. So a small amount in the 3rd does not mean a small business. It can mean that it got a lot in the 1st and the 2nd. That is why the sum of all seven rounds counts as one value.

The amount in the registry is what the business received. The repayment to the state was 25%, 33% or 50% depending on the 2020 drop and the losses, and it does not show there.

The numbers, for those who want them

Data: the state aid accumulation registry (sorefsis.gr), as downloaded to bizlist.gr up to 29/08/2026. 23,560 businesses with a Repayable Advance, 78,028 records, €1.75 billion. Nationally, €8.3 billion went to about 700,000 beneficiaries, so I have 3% of the beneficiaries and 21% of the money, weighted toward larger businesses. Of these, 8,437 have 2019 financial statements and 9,800 have 2020 financial statements. Revenue: 2019 financial statements, twelve-month financial year, in euros, above €1,000.

Rounds 3 to 7 write their number in the registry. The 1st and the 2nd both write "ΕΠΙΣΤΡΕΠΤΕΑ ΠΡΟΚΑΤΑΒΟΛΗ 2020" (the Greek name of the scheme) and are split by the approval date, July for the second. The joint ministerial decisions (KYA) of rounds 1 to 4 were read from their consolidated versions, rounds 5 to 7 from secondary sources, with their limits confirmed by the amounts in the registry.

The multipliers in the first table are medians of the ratio "2019 revenue to total Repayable Advance", by number of rounds. In the median business, all rounds together were 6.8% of 2019 revenue. I also tried a regression on a log scale by round: it gains nothing over the simple table, 46.5% against 47.5% within half to double, so the profile uses the table. The sector factor is a median by two-digit activity code (KAD, the Greek extension of NACE) for the 22 sectors with 100 or more businesses in the sample, tested out of sample: it raises "one third to three times" from 69.1% to 73.0%. What the amount does not explain is the drop of each business and its margin, which we do not know.

Not measured: employees, who are not public per business, and businesses that never received a Repayable Advance. The 1% to 2% of records that are a round amount times 1.15 (2,300, 4,600, 575), for an unknown reason, stay in as they are.