Invoice generator › Irish clients

Invoicing a client in Ireland

Ireland looks like the simplest English-speaking euro market to invoice into, and often it is. The complication, when it comes, is that the company you are dealing with is the European entity of a group headquartered somewhere else.

• Reverse charge
• Group entities
• Euro

Invoice the entity, not the brand

A large share of Ireland's corporate base is made up of European subsidiaries of American groups. The person who hires you works for a company everyone knows by one name, and the legal entity that will pay you is called something like [Brand] Technologies Ireland Limited, with a Dublin address and its own VAT number.

Getting this wrong is the most common reason a freelance invoice to an Irish client is rejected. If you address the invoice to the brand, or to the US parent, their accounts payable system cannot match it to a vendor record and it comes back — often weeks later, because it sat in a queue first.

So ask, before you invoice, for three things in writing: the exact legal entity name, its registered address, and its VAT number. Ask your contact to copy them from a document rather than typing them from memory.

The VAT number, and the reverse charge

Irish VAT numbers are the prefix IE, then seven digits, then one or two letters — IE1234567T. The trailing letter is what makes people assume they have been sent a typo, because most EU VAT numbers are digits only after the prefix. It is not a typo, and stripping it will make the number fail validation.

For B2B services the general EU rule applies: the supply is taxed where the customer is, you invoice without VAT, and the Irish client accounts for it. The invoice must carry both VAT numbers and state the reverse charge. Ireland being English-speaking, the plain wording is enough:

"Reverse charge — VAT to be accounted for by the recipient."

Validate the number in VIES first. The VAT checker does the lookup and interprets the result for the invoice.

For context on what is being shifted: Ireland's standard VAT rate is 23%, with reduced rates of 13.5% and 9%, a 4.8% livestock rate and a zero rate. Most professional and creative services sit at the standard rate, so 23% is the figure your Irish client will be self-assessing when the reverse charge applies. That is also why they care whether the invoice is right.

You do not put that rate on your invoice. Under the reverse charge you show no VAT at all and state that the customer accounts for it: the 23% appears in their return, not on your document. Showing a rate you are not charging is a reliable way to get an accounts payable clerk to query the invoice.

Vendor onboarding is a step, not a formality

Large Irish subsidiaries usually run a formal vendor onboarding process before they can pay anyone. Expect to be asked for bank details on their form rather than from your invoice, for a tax residency document, and sometimes for a signed supplier agreement.

The document they are asking for is a certificate of tax residence: an official statement, issued by the tax authority of the country where you are resident, confirming your residence for the purposes of the double taxation treaty between that country and Ireland. You request it from your own tax authority, so allow time for it — it is not something you can produce on the afternoon the client asks.

Its purpose is to let the Irish payer apply the treaty rather than deduct tax at the domestic rate. Which is another way of saying that the delay in getting it is not bureaucracy for its own sake: without it, they may be obliged to withhold.

None of this is difficult, but it takes calendar time and it happens before your first payment, not before your first invoice. Start it in week one of the engagement. Freelancers who leave onboarding until the invoice is due routinely wait sixty days for their first payment and conclude that the client is a bad payer, when the delay was structural.

Purchase orders and the portal

If your client is a subsidiary of a multinational, there is almost certainly a purchase order, and almost certainly an invoicing portal. The PO number is more important to them than your invoice number: without it, the invoice cannot be matched and will not be paid regardless of how correct everything else is.

Get the PO before you start work. Put it on every invoice against that engagement, in a field of its own rather than buried in a description line.

Payment, currency and terms

Invoice in euro. Ireland is in the eurozone, and an invoice in dollars to an Irish entity — even one owned by an American company — creates a conversion question that nobody on their side wants to answer.

30 days net is the market standard with Irish corporate clients, unless something different has been agreed. Larger subsidiaries sometimes propose longer terms in their own supplier agreement, and that agreement will override whatever your invoice says — so read it before you sign it rather than after the first invoice is late.

Payment comes by SEPA transfer to your IBAN. Make sure the account name matches the entity name on your invoice exactly — with a large payer, a mismatch means a manual review and another payment cycle.

Where Ireland is genuinely easier

Everything is in English, so there is no translation question and no ambiguity in your contract wording. The currency is the euro, so there is no conversion. And because the market is full of international companies, your being based in another country is unremarkable to them.

If you are an English-speaking freelancer looking for a first market outside your own, Ireland is a reasonable place to start for exactly these reasons — provided you handle the entity name and the onboarding properly.

Build it

Our invoice generator takes the full legal entity name and address, both VAT numbers, a PO reference and the reverse charge note, and outputs a PDF that an accounts payable system can process. No account, nothing stored.

Frequently asked questions