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The standard rate is 23% and the livestock rate is 4.8%, and between them sit a reduced rate, a second reduced rate and a zero rate — five live rungs, with the right one determined by what was sold, line by line. That is a different problem from the one across the Irish Sea. A UK return is a form our records fill badly; an Irish invoice is a rate our records cannot choose. We resolve tax for the organization, and an item gets three treatment values that collapse into two outcomes: the organization's rate, or zero. The third behaviour is the one to know about — set an item's treatment to reduced and it is charged the standard rate, silently, because anything we do not recognise falls through to the default. This page is about that, and about what it means for a business whose ordinary work sits on a middle rung.
The reason this is not a small gap
A system with a single tax rate is obviously inadequate and everyone treats it accordingly. A system with a default rate and a zero override looks adequate, because the two commonest cases are covered and the demonstration always uses them. What it cannot do is the middle, and the middle is where Irish trade sits — repair, maintenance, construction, cleaning, food service, agriculture. So the failure does not show up in a sales demo. It shows up on the first mixed invoice, and it shows up as a number that is simply too high rather than as an error anybody notices.
And there is a sharper edge. Because the treatment column falls through to the default for any value it does not recognise, writing reduced into it produces the standard rate — not a warning, not a zero, not a validation failure. Somebody trying to do the right thing gets the wrong answer, and the record they leave behind looks deliberate. The honest architectural recommendation for Ireland is the mirror of our UK one: let the system that determines the rate own the invoice. If your business genuinely lives on one rung, we are a straightforward fit and the default does the work. If your invoices mix rungs, the rate has to be decided somewhere that can hold more than two answers.
Measured, not estimated
Rates are Revenue's; the reachability column is a fact about our own code on 5 August 2026 — specifically the single function that decides what rate a line is charged, which takes an organization default and an item treatment and has three branches producing two outcomes. The ladder above is drawn from this table, so the picture cannot drift from the prose. We deliberately do not list what sits on each rung: the rungs are stable and the assignments have moved more than once, and a page that printed the menu would be wrong within a year.
Standard rate
The organization default for an Irish organization, resolved from the country rate we ship, and what every line gets unless its treatment says otherwise. Our records are good at this rung and only this rung.
Reduced rate
The rung most Irish services and construction work actually sits on, and the reason this page exists. It can be reached only by making it the whole organization's default — which is correct for a business that sells nothing else, and wrong the moment one line is standard-rated. There is no per-line way to select it.
Second reduced rate
Same mechanism and the same limit. This is also the rung whose contents have moved most, which is a reason to keep the rate out of your software's assumptions rather than a reason to hard-code it.
Livestock rate
Agricultural, narrow, and structurally stable. Reachable the same way and with the same consequence: an agricultural business selling anything at another rate has no way to say so on the line.
Zero rate
Genuinely per-line. An item marked zero-rated or exempt returns nil tax for that line, which is the one place our model does what Ireland needs. Note that zero-rated and exempt are not the same thing for a return and our schema treats them identically.
What this costs in practice
The rate is a property of the supply, not of the seller
Most systems, including this one, treat the rate as a setting on the organization. Ireland treats it as a determination about what was sold. Every mixed invoice is that mismatch made concrete.
A mixed supply changes the rate of the whole line
Under the two-thirds rule, a contract that is mostly goods by value can be taxed as goods even though it was sold as a service. That is a composition test on the line — it cannot be answered by a setting anywhere above the line.
Zero-rated and exempt are not the same and get stored the same
Both produce nil tax on a line and they have different consequences for what a business can reclaim. Our treatment column maps both to zero, so the distinction is gone by the time the record is saved.
The wrong rate is arithmetic, not an error
A missing figure gets found. A figure computed at 23% that should have been 13.5% balances perfectly, reconciles perfectly, and is wrong. Nothing in a system that only knows one positive rate can flag it.
Scope, in three parts rather than two
Three columns, because "no" means two entirely different things and one list hides which is which. The middle column is where the per-line rate work sits, and it is the reason this page can describe a gap without treating it as permanent.
Real today
Not built yet — and commissionable
What we would decline, and would rather say now
The Irish gaps are one piece of work with an obvious order: a per-line rate selected from a set the organization defines, then a distinction between zero-rated and exempt that survives being saved, then a return assembled from both. The first is a schema and resolver change and it is the one without which the others mean nothing — and it would improve every multi-rate market in the product rather than only this one, which is the argument for doing it properly rather than for Ireland specifically. The precedent is real rather than rhetorical: eTIMS transmission and a maintained statutory payroll engine were both built to specification for one market and are part of the product now. Usual terms — a written specification, a timeline and a price agreed before anything starts, and no dates on a public page.
One thing we would rather state than have inferred from the ladder. The 23% rung being the only one our default reaches is not a claim that Irish businesses mostly charge 23%. Many charge 13.5% on nearly everything they sell, and for those businesses the default does the work correctly and this page overstates the problem. The failure is specific: it is mixed invoices, and it is silent when it happens.
Operations in Ireland
The rate ladder above is a real defect and it is worth the length. It is also not the reason an Irish company changes system. A small operation selling into much larger markets carries a documentation load out of all proportion to its headcount — batch records, equipment that a grant paid for and that must still be provably in place, hours that have to be recorded whether or not anyone asks. Every one of those is a record with a date on it, held against the thing it belongs to.
Quality holds
Stock that can be blocked from sale while a question is open
Batch and expiry at item level, plus a status that holds affected stock back from sale pending release. In a country whose manufacturing base is largely regulated, the ability to quarantine by lot is closer to the centre of the operation than any tax setting.
Assets
Grant-funded equipment, still provably where it was put
Capital equipment bought with support money usually carries an obligation to keep it in place and in use for years afterwards. The register holds the custodian, the location, the movement history, a verification rhythm and the documents — which is what makes a claim about an asset checkable rather than remembered.
Leave & hours
Working-time records that exist before they are requested
Hours, shifts and leave balances held against the employee record and exportable. We keep the record; turning it into an entitlement or a statutory return is payroll's job, and Irish payroll is not ours.
Stock transfers
Goods moving to a site under a different customs regime
Approved, confirmed transfers between locations with quantities acknowledged at both ends. Movement onto the island's other jurisdiction is an ordinary transfer to us and a customs question to your adviser — we record what moved, when, and who signed for it.
Projects
Project cost coded as it is entered, not reconstructed for a claim
Labour and purchases attributed to a project at entry, with budget checks at commitment. Where funding or relief depends on demonstrating project spend, the useful thing is a cost record built as the work happened. We produce the record, not the claim.
Procurement
Approvals and matching at a headcount that has no procurement team
Requisition, threshold approval, purchase order, receipt and three-way match. In a forty-person company the control is usually one person's memory; the point of the module is that it stops being that without adding a department.
The qualification this section needs: no Irish payroll engine — no PAYE, PRSI or USC calculation and no submission on each pay run — so everything above about hours and leave is a record rather than a payroll run. It is on the commissionable list, and Kenya's maintained statutory engine is the reason we would price that work rather than guess at it.
Before you buy anything
Count the rungs on last quarter's invoices
Not which rates exist in Ireland — which ones your own business actually issued. A single-rung business has a much shorter software conversation than a mixed one, and most people have never counted.
Find out what your system does with an unrecognised rate
Put a value the software does not know into its tax field and see whether you get an error, a zero, or the standard rate. The third is the dangerous answer and it is more common than the first.
Decide where rate determination lives before you shortlist
If it lives in your accounting system, your operations system needs exports rather than a tax engine, and that is a much cheaper requirement to satisfy. Settle it first and the shortlist changes.
Questions we are asked here
Can we charge 13.5% on some lines and 23% on others?
Not today, and this is the page's central limitation. A line gets the organization's default rate or zero — there is no per-line rate selection. On the roadmap, and commissionable now. The work is a rate set the organization defines and a selector on the line, plus the resolver change behind it; it is well-scoped, it would benefit every multi-rate market in the product rather than only Ireland, and the precedent is Kenya, where we built and still maintain a statutory tax integration. We would give you a written specification, a timeline and a price before anything started, and we will not put a date on a public page.
What actually happens if I type "reduced" into an item's tax treatment?
You get the standard rate. The resolver reads a blank or standard treatment as the default rate, a zero-rated or exempt one as nil, and treats everything else as the default — so an unrecognised value produces 23% rather than an error. We would rather tell you that here than have you find it on a reconciliation. On the roadmap, and commissionable now as part of the per-line rate work above; in the meantime the safe practice is to leave the treatment blank and know that every positive-rated line is at your organization's default.
Do you distinguish zero-rated from exempt?
No. Both resolve to nil tax on the line and both are stored the same way, so the record cannot tell you afterwards which was meant. That matters because the two have different consequences for what a business can reclaim, and it is a genuine defect rather than a simplification. On the roadmap, and commissionable now, and it is the second item in the sequence after per-line rates because it is the same part of the schema.
Can AWRA file a VAT3 or an RTD to Revenue?
No. There is no Revenue integration, no ROS connection, no VAT3, no Return of Trading Details, no Intrastat and no VIES. On the roadmap, and commissionable now. What the work involves is a rate model that can produce the figures, a return assembled from them, and then transmission with the authorisation and testing that requires — in that order, because the first is what makes the rest meaningful. Kenya's eTIMS transmission is a live tax-authority integration we built and maintain, so this is a known shape of project. Specification, timeline and price first.
Do you handle Irish payroll — PAYE, PRSI, USC, PAYE Modernisation?
No. On the roadmap, and commissionable now. There are no PAYE, PRSI or USC tables, no submission on a pay run, and no pension auto-enrolment assessment. What exists is labour cost attributed to projects and cost centres, which is genuinely useful for margin work and is not payroll. We maintain exactly one statutory payroll engine, for Kenya, and it is the reason we can price this kind of work rather than guess at it.
Will you tell us which VAT rate our services fall under?
A boundary rather than a backlog. No, and a commissioned build would not change it. Which rung a supply sits on — and how the two-thirds rule applies to a contract that mixes goods and services — is a determination about your business that your accountant makes and signs. Software offering a view would be inviting you to rely on it, and the protection is that we hold the evidence in a form your adviser can work from rather than reaching a conclusion nobody would stand behind. This is the same boundary our UK page draws around recoverability, for the same reason.
We are forty people shipping into much bigger markets. Which part of this is for us?
The records part, and the size is exactly why. A forty-person Irish exporter carries the documentation load of a company several times larger — batch and expiry on stock that can be held back from sale pending release, capital equipment that a grant paid for and that must still be provably in place years later, working-time records that exist whether or not anyone asks for them, project cost coded as it is entered because a claim will need it. In a company that size the control is usually one experienced person's memory, and the point of the modules is that it stops being that without adding a department. The rate ladder above is a real defect in how we store a tax treatment and it is worth reading if you sell across several rates; it is not the reason a company of your size changes system.
Can our data stay in the EU?
Two halves, and they have different answers. On the roadmap, and commissionable now: an EU-region deployment is a real thing we would do, priced as a piece of work, because hosting region is a property of a deployment. A boundary rather than a backlog: it is not a per-organization setting and we will not describe it as one. There is no column, no flag and no switch that puts one organization in a different region from its neighbours, and the sub-processor register is a single list applying to everybody on a deployment. Our compliance matrix claimed otherwise until 5 August 2026 and now carries the correction with a verification date beside it.
Further reading
Ireland runs five VAT rates at once. Most systems offer one default and a zero override, which covers the two commonest cases and fails silently between them — including, in ours, by charging the standard rate when you ask for a reduced one.
A table with one row per country claims each country has one rate. True for most. For the rest it is a category error — and ours does not merely inform, it writes the value into an organization's settings and never revisits it.
Four exclusions at the top rather than the bottom: no Revenue integration, no Irish payroll, no per-line VAT rate, no Irish reference customer. Then the questions worth asking everybody else.
Next step
If your invoices sit on one rate, this is a short conversation and a straightforward fit. If they mix, the honest question is whether the rate should be determined here at all — and if you want it to be, the work is a rate set, a line selector and a return, in that order.