ERP and accounting software for Ireland: VAT, ROS, FRS 102

Irish compliance in one view

Running the books of an Irish business means filing VAT every two months on the Revenue Online Service, reporting payroll to Revenue every time staff are paid, keeping six years of records, and preparing FRS 102 or IFRS accounts for the Companies Registration Office. From November 2028 the largest companies must also issue structured e-invoices. It matters because each obligation reads directly from the ledger.

Revenue administers VAT, corporation tax, income tax, PAYE, PRSI and the Universal Social Charge through one online service, ROS. Company law obligations, including the annual return and the filing of financial statements, sit with the Companies Registration Office. The Irish Auditing and Accounting Supervisory Authority oversees the audit profession and corporate reporting.

This page sets out what those rules actually require as of September 2026, where a finance system either helps or gets in the way, and what Skyline Nexus ERP covers for an Irish business today and what is being rolled out.

• Tax authority: Revenue, filing through ROS
• Company registry: Companies Registration Office (CRO)
• Currency: euro; standard VAT rate 23%
• Accounts: FRS 102, FRS 105 or EU-adopted IFRS
• E-invoicing: phasing in from 1 November 2028 for large corporates

VAT rates and the July 2026 change

Ireland uses five VAT rates in daily practice. The standard rate is 23%. The 13.5% reduced rate covers items such as guest and holiday accommodation and many construction services. The 9% second reduced rate applies to items such as periodicals, sports facilities, and electricity and gas until 31 December 2030, and, from 1 July 2026, to restaurant and catering services, hot takeaway food and drink supplied as part of those services, and hairdressing. Livestock carries 4.8%, and the flat-rate addition paid to unregistered farmers is 4.5% from 1 January 2026, down from 5.1%.

The July 2026 change is a practical test of any invoicing system. A hotel restaurant now charges 9% on the meal and 13.5% on the room, and alcohol, soft drinks and bottled water stay at 23% even inside a restaurant bill. That means rates must be determined line by line, and a credit note raised in September 2026 against a June 2026 meal must carry the June rate, not today's.

Registration thresholds are 42,500 euro for services and 85,000 euro for goods (where at least 90% of turnover comes from goods), with a 10,000 euro EU-wide threshold for distance sales and cross-border electronic services, as of September 2026. Traders whose turnover does not exceed 2 million euro, or at least 90% of whose supplies go to unregistered customers or customers who cannot fully recover VAT, may apply to account for VAT on the moneys received basis instead of the invoice basis.

• 23% standard rate
• 13.5% reduced rate, including guest accommodation
• 9% second reduced rate, including restaurant and catering from 1 July 2026
• 4.8% livestock rate; 4.5% flat-rate farmer addition
• Registration: 42,500 euro services, 85,000 euro goods
• Moneys received basis: turnover up to 2 million euro, or mainly unregistered customers

Filing VAT: VAT3, the Return of Trading Details and reverse charges

The standard VAT period is two months. Returns and payment are due by the 19th of the month after the period ends, or the 23rd when the return is filed and the tax paid through ROS. Revenue can authorise four-monthly returns where annual liability is between 3,001 and 14,400 euro, and six-monthly returns where it is 3,000 euro or less.

Once a year the Return of Trading Details (RTD) reports total sales and purchases broken down by VAT rate. The RTD is where a ledger that stores the rate against each line pays off; a ledger that only holds totals makes the RTD a reconstruction exercise.

Two reverse-charge regimes catch people who come from elsewhere. In construction, a principal contractor accounts for VAT on services received from a subcontractor where Relevant Contracts Tax applies, and the subcontractor's invoice carries no VAT. For intra-EU purchases of goods and most business services received from abroad, the Irish customer self-accounts for the VAT. Both need their own tax codes so the VAT3 boxes and the RTD come out right.

E-invoicing: what is announced and what is not

Ireland has had no mandatory business-to-business e-invoicing. That changed on 8 October 2025, when Revenue published its VAT Modernisation implementation plan, and on 10 February 2026 Revenue confirmed which businesses fall into the first phase. As of September 2026 the published timeline has three phases.

Phase one, from 1 November 2028: VAT-registered businesses whose tax affairs are managed by Revenue's Large Corporates Division, and which are established in Ireland, must issue structured e-invoices and report a subset of the invoice data to Revenue in real time for domestic B2B supplies. Phase two, from November 2029: the domestic obligation extends to all VAT-registered businesses engaged in intra-EU B2B trade that use the 0% arrangements for that trade. Phase three, from 1 July 2030: the EU's VAT in the Digital Age rules apply to all cross-border B2B supplies between member states.

An e-invoice for this purpose must follow the European standard EN 16931 in a structured format such as XML. A PDF, even one generated by software, and a scanned paper invoice do not qualify. Revenue has also stressed that from 1 November 2028 every Irish business must be able to receive structured e-invoices, even before it is obliged to issue them.

What Revenue has not yet published is the full technical specification of the reporting channel. We are not going to invent a date or a format that the tax authority has not announced. The low-regret preparation is data quality: complete customer VAT numbers, tax stored per line, and one invoice record from which any future structured format can be produced.

• 1 November 2028: large corporates, domestic B2B, issue and report
• November 2029: all VAT-registered businesses in intra-EU B2B trade
• 1 July 2030: EU-wide ViDA rules for cross-border B2B supplies
• Format: EN 16931 structured data; PDF and scans do not qualify
• From 1 November 2028: every business must be able to receive e-invoices

Company accounts: FRS 102, IFRS and the audit exemption

Irish companies prepare either Companies Act financial statements, using FRS 102 (with the reduced disclosures of Section 1A for small companies), FRS 105 for micro companies or FRS 101 for qualifying subsidiaries, or IFRS financial statements under IFRS as adopted by the EU. Groups with securities traded on an EU regulated market must use EU-adopted IFRS in their consolidated accounts. FRS 102 is issued by the UK Financial Reporting Council and applies in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

The FRC's periodic-review amendments to FRS 102 take effect for accounting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2026. They bring a lease model close to IFRS 16 on to the lessee's balance sheet and a five-step revenue model close to IFRS 15. An Irish company with a calendar year is therefore applying them in 2026, and its ledger must hold the lease and contract detail that the new models need.

The European Union (Adjustments of Size Criteria) Regulations 2024 raised the thresholds by roughly a quarter. A company qualifies as small, and can claim audit exemption, if it meets two of three conditions: turnover not exceeding 15 million euro, balance sheet total not exceeding 7.5 million euro, and an average of no more than 50 employees. The directors must include a statement in the balance sheet, and filing the annual return late can cost the exemption for future years.

Payroll: PAYE Modernisation, PRSI and auto-enrolment

Since 2019 Irish payroll has been reported in real time. Each time employees are paid, the employer files a payroll submission with Revenue, on or before the pay date, showing pay, income tax, PRSI and the Universal Social Charge for each employee. Revenue totals the submissions into a monthly statement, available by the 5th of the next month. If the employer does not accept it by the 14th, Revenue deems it to be the monthly return, and payment is due by the 23rd for ROS users.

From 1 January 2026 the auto-enrolment retirement savings scheme, My Future Fund, applies to employees aged 23 to 60 earning over 20,000 euro a year who are not already in a workplace pension. For the first three years the employee contributes 1.5%, the employer 1.5% and the State 0.5%, with rates rising from 2029.

For the accounting system the consequence is a payroll journal every pay run and a monthly reconciliation of PAYE, PRSI and USC liabilities to Revenue's statement, plus a separate liability for auto-enrolment contributions.

Cities and regions: where the rules differ

Irish tax is national. A business in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway, Waterford, Kilkenny, Athlone, Drogheda, Dundalk or Sligo charges the same VAT, files the same VAT3 through ROS and runs the same PAYE payroll. There is no regional VAT or regional corporation tax.

The one local charge that genuinely varies is commercial rates. Each local authority, from Dublin City Council to Galway City Council, sets its own Annual Rate on Valuation at its budget meeting, and the bill is that multiplier applied to the rateable valuation fixed independently by Tailte Éireann. A multi-site business therefore needs its property costs tracked by location, because the same floor area costs different amounts in different council areas.

Cross-border trade with Northern Ireland is the other place where geography matters. Under the Windsor Framework, goods moving between Ireland and Northern Ireland follow EU VAT rules for goods, while services follow the UK rules, so a Dundalk or Drogheda business trading into Newry or Belfast needs its tax codes to distinguish the two.

What a finance system must do for an Irish business

Put the rules together and the requirements on a ledger are concrete. Tax has to be stored per invoice line, with rates that change on a date without rewriting history, because the RTD and any future e-invoice read line detail. Posted entries must be corrected by reversal, visibly, because six-year retention is only useful if the record cannot be quietly edited.

Many Irish companies do not use a calendar year, so the ledger must support a financial year starting in any month, with periods that can be closed once the VAT3 is filed. And whatever system issues invoices today should be able to produce EN 16931 data, or hand clean data to a provider that can, before 2028 or 2029 depending on which phase applies.

• Line-level VAT with dated rate changes
• Correction by reversal and a full audit trail
• Non-calendar financial years and period locks
• Payroll journals reconciled to Revenue's monthly statement
• Clean customer VAT data ready for EN 16931 invoices

How Skyline Nexus ERP handles Irish requirements

Skyline Nexus ERP is a cloud ERP with a double-entry general ledger under Fiscal Authority. When the auto-post switches are on, final sales, purchases, payments, expenses and depreciation post balanced journals in the background, with output VAT computed per line on the same basis as the tax report. The VAT Return screen prefills tax-exclusive sales and purchase bases and VAT for a date range, ready to be entered on the VAT3 in ROS. Posted journals are corrected by reversal, fiscal periods can be soft-closed or locked, and an Accounting Audit Trail records who changed what, with old and new values. The chart of accounts can be imported from CSV or Excel, and fiscal years can start on any date.

Each VAT rate is set up as its own tax rate, so the July 2026 change is handled by adding a 9% rate and assigning it to catering and hairdressing items from 1 July, while 13.5% stays in place for accommodation. For the six-year retention period, the Audit Pack exports each year's ledger, journals, sales, purchases and VAT summary to one Excel workbook.

National e-invoicing connectors are being rolled out market by market, and Irish EN 16931 e-invoicing for the 2028 and 2029 phases is part of that programme: tell us your country and we will confirm your go-live date. Until then, a partner-led integration can pass sales and sales returns from the Skyline Nexus ERP Connector REST API to an Irish e-invoicing service provider. Irish PAYE payroll runs in Revenue-integrated payroll software or through a payroll partner, with the payroll journal posted to the ledger each pay run.

Rates, regimes and deadlines in this summary change, and many countries are actively legislating on e-invoicing. This is general information, not tax or legal advice — confirm the current position with the authority named above or with your tax adviser before you rely on it.