Payroll and supplier payments · Ireland
We run the pay run and the bills.
Your people are paid on the day. Your suppliers are paid on terms. What you keep is the yes.
Payroll and suppliers are not two jobs. They are one thing: the money that leaves your business every month, on dates you cannot move. Oystertide runs that cycle, for businesses that pay people and suppliers every month and do not have a finance department to do it. What is due, to whom, on what terms, in what order. It is prepared, checked, and put in front of you.
You keep the gate.
A tide gate does one job. This one holds until you open it.
Every run stops in front of you. You see who is being paid, what for, and on what date, before anything happens. Nothing happens that you have not approved. Not a supplier, not a changed bank account, not a payment that looks obviously fine.
That is the whole of your involvement in a run. Everything before it is ours, and nothing after it happens without it.
You stay the employer. You stay the counterparty to your own suppliers. The relationships do not move. What you are handing over is the work and the calendar.
Outsourcing moves the work. It does not move your name off the return.
The work is delegated.
The authority is not.
One cycle covers both runs, because your month already does.
Both run against the same calendar. Here is what each involves.
STAFF
Payroll processing on your cycle.
Weekly, fortnightly or monthly, whichever you already run.
PAYE, PRSI and USC.
These are reported to Revenue on or before each pay date. That deadline is what your pay run is scheduled against.
RPNs.
A pay date needs that year's Revenue Payroll Notification, retrieved before the run.
Starters and leavers.
Processed in the cycle they occur in, not swept up at month end.
Statutory leave and payments.
Sick pay, maternity, paternity and parents' leave, and annual leave and public holiday accrual.
Auto-enrolment under My Future Fund.
Enrolment and contributions, on the cycle you already run. NAERSA determines who is eligible.
Pension and benefit deductions.
Applied and reconciled each cycle.
Year-end.
The final period of the tax year closed off and reconciled against what has been reported.
- A. MurphyOperations€2,840Submitted
- S. O’BrienFinance€3,120Submitted
- C. ByrneEngineering€3,465Submitted
- N. KellySupport€2,610Submitted
- D. WalshOperations€2,975Submitted
Submitted to Revenue · on or before pay date
SUPPLIERS
Your invoices, however they already arrive.
Post, email, portal, or your bookkeeper's pile. Nothing changes about how your suppliers invoice you.
What is due, to whom, and on what terms.
Assembled from the invoices you already receive.
The terms themselves, tracked.
Including the statutory default that applies where a contract sets none.
The run, built in date order.
So nothing is early because it was loud and nothing is late because it was quiet.
Duplicates caught before the run.
Not after the second payment.
Changes to a supplier's bank details, verified before they enter a run.
Never taken from an email.
Supplier queries come to us.
A question about a payment does not have to reach you to get an answer, and chasing it does not become your job.
The run put in front of you for approval.
Every line showing who, what for, and on what date.
PAYMENT RUN · MARCH
- Office supplies · 14 days · due Wed 18 Mar
- Electrical contractor · 30 days · due Fri 3 Apr
- Print and signage · 60 days, expressly agreed · due Mon 4 May
Whoever you use today, the week that contains both is still yours.
The riskiest payment run is the one nobody checks.
Handing over supplier payments feels like a bigger step than handing over payroll, and it is. Payroll is a list: the same people, roughly the same shape, every month. A supplier run is judgment. New payees, changing amounts, and bank details that arrive by email.
Now look at who runs the payment run where you are. One person. They cannot escalate a decision above themselves, because there is nobody above them. They cannot separate preparing a payment from approving it, because they do both. That is not carelessness. It is a control structure with one seat in it, operated at the end of a long day.
A payment run that is prepared by one party and approved by another is not a loosening of control. It is the control structure a single-handed finance function cannot produce. Here, the two parties are not even in the same company.
In Ireland, interest on a late commercial payment is automatic. It runs from the relevant payment date without a reminder, and the supplier does not have to ask for it.
The rate is the European Central Bank main refinancing rate as at the first of January and the first of July, plus eight percentage points, calculated at a daily rate. It moves twice a year, so your runs are built against the current one rather than against a number printed on a website.
European Communities (Late Payment in Commercial Transactions) Regulations 2012, S.I. 580/2012, as amended, and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment’s late-payment guidance.
We have no record yet. We have rules.
Nothing happens without your approval. Not a supplier, not a payroll change, not a payment that looks obviously fine.
A change to a supplier's bank details is never taken from an email. It is confirmed with a known contact at that supplier before it enters a run.
A run is checked by someone who did not prepare it.
Dates come from the calendar, not from memory. Every run is scheduled against the statutory date, not against the day someone remembers it.
What you pay yourself is known to us and to nobody in your building.
Your employee and supplier data is used to run your cycle and for nothing else. It is not sold, it is not used to market anything to you, and it does not go to anyone outside the work.
And the one we will not dress up: the obligation stays yours. These rules exist to keep it from being tested.
A changeover is a reconciliation, not a date.
You will not change this in January because January is tidy. You will change it because the person who did it has left, or a letter arrived from Revenue, or a supplier rang about an invoice that had already been paid.
So the first cycle is designed to be boring.
Outgoing arrangement
First cycle
- What we need from you.
- Your current payroll records and year-to-date figures, your pay dates, your employer registration details, your supplier list and the terms you are on with each of them. Things you already hold.
- What happens first.
- Year-to-date figures are reconciled line by line against what has already been reported to Revenue for this year. This is the step people skip, and it is the reason a switch shows up as a wrong total in December rather than in week one.
- RPNs before the first run.
- Current RPNs are retrieved for the coming period, so your Revenue submissions continue from where they are.
- Who we call, agreed with you.
- For each supplier, the person and the number used to confirm a change of bank details is set at the start, with you, from what you already know about that supplier. Not from anything that arrives later.
- Who files what, in writing.
- The thing that genuinely goes wrong in a switch is a period where both providers assume the other one has it. That gets agreed in writing, by date, before the first run rather than after it.
- If you have not employed before.
- Registration as an employer with Revenue has to be in place before a first run. Who does that, and by when, is agreed in writing with everything else.
- What you will see.
- The first run reaches you the same way every run after it will. In front of you, in date order, waiting on your approval.
You do not have to wait until January. If your current arrangement is already producing late returns, waiting five months for a tidy starting line is not the safe option. It is the same risk, for longer.
What we need in order to quote you.
There is no figure on this page, and we are not going to pretend that is a strategy. A rate that means anything depends on four things, and until we know them any number would be a guess dressed up as a price.
Two businesses with twelve staff can be completely different jobs. One pays four supplier invoices a month, the other ninety.
So here are the four things.
- 1. How often you pay people, weekly, fortnightly or monthly:
- 2. How many people are on the payroll:
- 3. Roughly how many supplier payments go out in a month:
- 4. Switching from someone else, or setting payroll up for the first time: