Startup accounting software in Ireland: set it up right once

You must register once turnover passes Revenue’s thresholds, €42,500 for services or €85,000 for goods, but many startups register voluntarily earlier so they can reclaim VAT on set-up costs. Talk to your accountant about which suits you, then make sure your software is coding Irish VAT rates from day one.

Investors look for revenue split by stream, cost of sales separated from overheads, and payroll visible on its own. A few well-named accounts now save rebuilding history later. Avoid a long tail of tiny categories nobody reviews.

Software subscriptions in dollars, a contractor paid in sterling, a first customer in Germany: startups meet foreign currency early. Multi-currency accounting records each item at its own rate and the exchange difference separately, which keeps margins honest. A dollar subscription, for example, should be recorded at the rate on the day it was paid, with any exchange difference shown on its own line.

Thirty minutes a week keeps a startup’s books investor-ready.

• Bring in statements for any account not yet connected.
• Confirm the transactions the AI flagged.
• Attach missing receipts while you remember them.
• At month end, read the profit and loss and cash position, not just the bank balance.

Irish startups often claim grants or reliefs that need evidence of what was spent and when. Due diligence for a funding round asks the same questions in more detail. Books where every payment carries its receipt and a clear category answer those questions in hours rather than weeks.

Tag spending by project from the start if a grant or relief depends on it. Rebuilding that split from bank statements a year later is slow, and the evidence is weaker.

Most are easy to avoid once you know them.

• Paying company costs from a personal card and never recording them.
• Leaving foreign-currency subscriptions coded at the wrong rate.
• Treating investment received as revenue.
• Missing the first VAT return after registering because nobody owned the deadline.
• Waiting for year end before giving the accountant access.

The first employee changes the books more than any new customer. You register as an employer with Revenue, report pay in real time on each pay date, and start recording wages, employer PRSI and the amounts owed to Revenue. Most startups use a payroll product or bureau for this and post the totals to their accounting software.

Set up the payroll accounts in the ledger before the first pay run, not after. Getting the structure right once avoids a messy correction across several months.

Once a startup has investors, a monthly or quarterly board pack becomes routine. If the books are reconciled weekly and closed monthly, the pack is an export plus a page of commentary. If they are not, it becomes a week of work every time. The habit pays for itself the first time a board member asks a detailed question about spend.

HelloBooks starts on a permanent Free plan and scales through paid tiers as volume and users grow, with multi-currency on Pro. Its AI keeps the ledger coded with Irish VAT treatment and computes VAT3 figures for you to enter in ROS.

Know the gaps: Irish payroll is not included, so early hires run through a payroll product or bureau, and direct Irish bank connections are still rolling out, with statement upload available now.