ERP Audit Consultant, Ireland

A system review, not a statutory or tax audit

The word audit means something specific in Ireland. Your statutory auditor signs off the annual accounts, and Revenue may examine your tax affairs. An ERP audit is neither. It is an independent look at whether the business system you already run is set up and used in a way that supports how the company works, and whether the data coming out of it deserves trust.

The reasons for asking for one vary. A new finance director wants to understand what they have inherited. A parent company wants assurance before adding another entity to the same database. The board is tired of month-end taking longer every quarter. Or the partner that implemented the system has moved on, and nobody inside the business has a full picture of the configuration.

Whatever the trigger, the method is the same. I agree the questions with you, gather evidence from walkthroughs, configuration and transaction samples, and write findings that each carry a cause, a business effect and a recommended action. Where a finding touches tax, payroll or data protection, I phrase it as a question for the right professional rather than an answer. My ERP health check service sets out the generic method; what follows is the Irish version of it.

VAT codes, EU listings and the trade across the Irish Sea

Irish VAT setups tend to drift. Codes are added for a new customer type, a template copied from a British sister company brings its own assumptions, and after a while nobody can say which code a sale to a Northern Ireland customer should carry. I do not decide that. I build an evidence pack your tax advisor can review quickly:

• A list of every tax code in use, with the transactions that used it during a recent period and the return box each one feeds.
• Samples of domestic sales, sales of goods to the EU, services to foreign businesses, purchases from Great Britain and imports, showing how each posted.
• The data behind the EU sales listings, compared with what the ledger holds for the same customers and VAT numbers.
• Where you use postponed accounting for import VAT, or deal with subcontractors under Relevant Contracts Tax, how those entries reach the system.

The advisor then confirms or corrects, and the correction goes into the fix list as a configuration change. I also note where the system stands on structured e-invoicing. Ireland is following the EU direction toward electronic invoices, with Peppol as a common exchange route for public bodies, so I record what your current setup can send and receive and leave the question of obligations and timing to your advisor.

Who can do what: access, payments and personal data

Access rights in a mature ERP usually reflect the organization chart of several years ago. People change roles and keep old permissions, a contractor login stays active after the contract ends, and a single finance user can often create a supplier, change its IBAN and release the payment run without a second pair of eyes. These are the findings that matter most when money leaves the company by SEPA transfer.

I export users, roles and approval limits, and map them against the duties that should be separated in your business: vendor master changes, invoice approval, payment release, journal posting, price changes and credit limits. Each conflict is listed with the user, the risk and a practical fix, which may be a role change, an approval step or a compensating review by a manager.

The same review raises data protection questions. Who can see payroll journals or employee bank details? How long are customer and staff records kept, and is there any routine for removing them when they are no longer needed? Irish companies answer to the Data Protection Commission under GDPR, but I do not interpret the law. I document what the system holds and who reaches it, then pass the questions to whoever advises you on data protection so retention and access rules are decided by the right person.

Interfaces, sterling and the spreadsheets around the ledger

An Irish ERP rarely stands alone. A payroll package sends journals, bank statements arrive by file or feed, a webshop or CRM pushes orders, and the parent may collect a monthly upload for consolidation. Each link can fail quietly. I trace every interface: what it sends, how often, which records it creates, who is told when it breaks and how much hand correction happens afterward.

Sterling deserves its own check. Companies that buy or sell in Great Britain often hold sterling bank accounts and customer balances, and revaluation is a common place for workarounds. I look at how exchange rates are maintained, whether unrealized differences are posted by the system or calculated in a spreadsheet, and whether the sterling bank account reconciles inside the ERP.

Then come the spreadsheets. I list every workbook finance and operations rely on each month, ask why it exists and classify the cause: a missing report, a configuration gap, poor master data or simple habit. Some spreadsheets are perfectly sensible. Others exist because the system was never set up to do something it can do, and those become quick wins. Fixing them after the audit is the work described on my ERP optimization page and the spreadsheet replacement guide.

Licenses, report trust and the findings you receive

Two more checks round out the review. The first is license usage: named users who have left, users holding a full license for a read-only job, and modules that were bought for a later phase that never happened. I list them so you can raise them with the vendor or partner at the next renewal. The second is report trust. I take the reports that reach the board or the parent, trace a handful of figures back to postings and note where definitions differ between the Irish view and the group view.

The final report is written for management. It opens with a short summary of overall health and the main risks, then lists findings by area, each with a priority, a likely cause and a recommended action. Questions for your tax advisor, auditor or data protection advisor are collected in a separate section so they can be sent on unchanged. I present the findings remotely in a readout with the people who will own the fixes, with visits possible by arrangement.

If the audit shows the system is broadly sound, fixes can run through your existing partner or internal team. If it shows a project still in trouble, the ERP rescue page for Ireland explains the next step. Wider context sits on ERP consulting in Ireland and the Irish hub page.