Accounting and payroll software in Ireland: one system or two?

Payroll in Ireland is reported to Revenue in real time, on or before each pay date. Since 2024 employers also report certain non-salary payments under the Enhanced Reporting Requirements, including small benefits, remote-working daily allowances, and travel and subsistence, with the date and amount of each.

That is specialist work, and it is why dedicated payroll products are so common among Irish employers and their bureaus.

Sage sells Irish payroll as an add-on to its accounting software, and Big Red Cloud integrates its own payroll. The appeal is one supplier and wages flowing into the ledger without a separate step. Check how many employees the payroll tier covers and what it costs on top of accounting.

Many Irish employers and almost every payroll bureau use a dedicated product such as BrightPay or Thesaurus Payroll Manager, which Bright describes as used by over 250,000 businesses across Ireland and the UK. Each pay period, the payroll totals are posted to the accounting software as a journal: gross pay, employer PRSI, deductions owed to Revenue, and net pay.

The extra step is small if your accounting software accepts that journal cleanly, and it keeps detailed employee pay data in the payroll product where it belongs.

Whichever route you take, the ledger should show four things for each pay run.

• Gross wages as an expense.
• Employer PRSI as an expense.
• Tax, USC and PRSI withheld as a liability to Revenue until paid.
• Net pay as a liability until the bank payment clears it.

The right setup depends on who runs payroll and how often.

If an external bureau runs payroll, you only need accounting software that accepts their journal and lets you reconcile the payments. If someone in-house runs it, the convenience of payroll inside the accounting product grows with the number of pay runs and starters and leavers each year.

• How many people do you pay, and how often?
• Does a bureau or accountant run payroll for you already?
• Who needs to see payroll detail, and who should only see totals?
• How will expenses and benefits reported under ERR be recorded in the books?

Payroll creates three kinds of bank payment: net pay to employees, the monthly payment to Revenue for tax, USC and PRSI, and any pension or other deductions paid to third parties. Each should clear a liability that the payroll journal created. If a liability balance keeps growing month after month, a payment has been coded to the wrong place, and it is better to catch that in March than in December.

Owner-directors of Irish companies are often on payroll too. Their pay goes through the same real-time reporting as staff, and their expense claims and benefits need the same care. Keep director pay, director expenses and director loan movements on separate accounts so the year-end picture is clear.

HelloBooks does not run Irish payroll. It suits option 2: keep your payroll product or bureau, and record each pay run in HelloBooks. Importing payroll journals directly from Irish payroll software is coming soon; until then the totals are entered as a journal, and the AI matches the net-pay and Revenue payments when they appear in the bank.