A quote that gets approved

What belongs in one

You will read on British sites that a quote has no legally required contents. In Ireland that is only half true, and the other half costs money. Two sets of rules reach the quote before the invoice does.

If your customer is a consumer, the Consumer Rights Act 2022 requires a list of information to be given before that customer is bound by the contract “or any corresponding offer” — and the corresponding offer is your quote. If you trade through a limited company, the Companies Act 2014 separately decides what has to appear on your business letters and order forms.

• Your own details. A company must show, on all its business letters and order forms, the name and legal form of the company, the place of registration and the number under which it is registered — in practice your CRO number — and the address of its registered office (section 151(2)). Business letters also carry the directors’ names (section 151(1)). Getting this wrong is a category 4 offence, not a style point. A sole trader or partnership using a registered business name instead has to state the proprietors’ true names on all business letters, circulars and catalogues (Registration of Business Names Act 1963, section 18).
• The customer’s details, with the name of whoever decides — not whoever filled in the enquiry form.
• A description of the work, concrete enough that in three months you both still understand the same thing by it.
• The price, and whether VAT is in it or on top of it. Which of those you write depends on who is reading. See the two sections below.
• Your payment terms — on the quote, not only in terms and conditions nobody reads.
• The validity period.
• How they approve it.

If your customer is a consumer, the law has a view

Which section applies depends on where the deal is done. Section 101 of the Consumer Rights Act 2022 covers the contract concluded at your own premises, section 103 the off-premises one — which for most trades means the quote you give at the customer’s house — and section 106 the distance one, where the whole thing happens by phone, email or web form. The list of information differs a little between them (Schedule 2 for the first, Schedule 3 for the other two), but the timing is identical in all three: the information has to reach the consumer before they are bound by the contract “or any corresponding offer”, and in language they can follow — “in a clear and comprehensible manner” in sections 101 and 103, “in plain and intelligible language” in section 106. A trader who doesn’t comply commits an offence.

The item that changes how a quote looks is the price. Schedule 2 asks for “the total price of the goods, digital content, digital service or service inclusive of taxes” or, where the price genuinely can’t be worked out in advance, “the manner in which the price is to be calculated”. Schedule 3 repeats it for off-premises and distance contracts. So a quote to a householder shows the figure they will actually pay, or explains honestly how it will be arrived at — a day rate, a rate per square metre, a materials-plus-labour split.

Two more that catch people out. For an off-premises contract, the information you gave “forms part of the contract and shall not be altered without the express agreement of the trader and the consumer” (section 103(7)). And under section 80(1)(b), the service has to comply with any written statement you made that the consumer relied on in deciding to go ahead. What you put in the quote is a term of the contract, not sales copy.

The cancellation period, and the sentence that protects you

Agree a job with a consumer away from your own premises — at their house, or entirely by phone and email — and a cancellation right attaches to it. For a service contract the period is 14 days from the day the contract is concluded, and 30 days where it was concluded in the context of an unsolicited visit to the consumer’s home (section 113).

That matters for the quote because of what happens when the customer wants you to start sooner, which is most of the time. If you begin work during the cancellation period, section 119 requires you to get an express request to that effect on a durable medium, together with an acknowledgement that once the job is fully done the right to cancel is gone. Without that request, a consumer who cancels mid-job “bears no cost” for what you have already supplied.

So the approval line on a consumer quote is doing legal work as well as commercial work. An email reply that says “approved, and please start before the 14 days are up” is a durable medium. A nod on the doorstep is not.

The VAT line, and the threshold that decides it

Registration is obligatory once your annual turnover exceeds the threshold: €42,500 for a person supplying services only, and €85,000 for a person supplying goods. You become an accountable person immediately on completing the transaction that takes you over, and you have to apply to Revenue within 30 days of that transaction.

Below the threshold you may register by choice, and if you haven’t, you must not charge VAT and you have no VAT number to show. Above it, the quote has to say which rate applies, because the two that matter to small firms are far apart: the standard rate is 23%, and the reduced rate of 13.5% covers certain building services, repair services, and cleaning and maintenance services generally. Quoting a kitchen refit at 23% when the work takes 13.5% isn’t a rounding error.

Then write the price for the reader in front of you. To a business customer: “€2,000 plus VAT at 13.5% — €2,270 in total”. To a consumer, Schedule 2 wants the inclusive figure, so lead with “€2,270 including VAT” and show the VAT underneath if you like. And if you aren’t registered: “€2,000 — no VAT applies, we are not VAT registered.” That last sentence looks like an admission and is the opposite: it answers the question before the customer’s bookkeeper asks it.

Sub-contractors in construction: no VAT on the quote at all

One Irish rule reverses everything above, and it applies to a large share of the people reading this. Where a sub-contractor supplies construction services to a principal contractor and RCT has to be operated, VAT goes on a reverse-charge basis: “the charge for services by a sub-contractor does not include VAT.” The principal contractor accounts for it instead, and pays you without it.

On the paperwork that means the invoice shows everything a VAT invoice shows except the VAT rate and the VAT amount, carries your own VAT registration number, and contains the statement ‘VAT on this supply to be accounted for by the principal contractor’. If RCT is deducted, it’s calculated on the VAT-exclusive amount.

So the same job produces two different quotes. To the homeowner: 13.5% on the price. To the principal contractor: no VAT, and a line saying why. Putting 13.5% on a quote to a main contractor is the quickest way to look like someone who hasn’t done this before.

The two that are most often missing

Those are the last two on the first list, and they’re precisely the two that do the most work.

The validity period gives you a natural reason to come back. “Your quote runs out Friday — shall I extend it?” is a question nobody minds, and it often produces an answer at last. Without an end date all you have is “have you decided yet?”, and that puts the work on them.

The approval route removes the final barrier. One sentence will do: “Happy with this? Reply to this email with ‘approved’ and we’ll get the start date in the diary.” Without that sentence the customer has to work out for themselves what to do next, and that costs exactly enough energy to put it off. For consumer work away from your premises, make that same sentence carry the express request from the section above and you have solved two problems with one line.

How long is a quote valid in Ireland?

There is no statutory answer. No Irish Act sets a validity period for a quote, and if you read somewhere that an Irish quote lasts thirty days, that is a habit rather than a rule.

What the law does is simpler and less comfortable. The Consumer Rights Act 2022 calls your quote an “offer”, and an offer binds nobody until it is accepted — which means you can withdraw it before then, and that it doesn’t sit open forever if you say nothing. Under ordinary contract law an offer lapses once a reasonable time has passed, and what counts as reasonable is decided afterwards by somebody who wasn’t there. That is the argument for putting a date on it.

The same logic runs through the price. If the contract doesn’t fix the price, and nothing you said or wrote fixed it either, section 83 decides it for you: “the price payable for the service shall be a reasonable price and no more”, and “what is a reasonable price for a service is a question of fact”. A quote is how you stop that question from ever being asked.

On the length itself: two to four weeks suits most small-business sales. Shorter feels like pressure; longer removes the reason to do anything with it. That’s a commercial judgement and nothing more — so pick a period that fits how this customer decides. If it has to go past a board meeting that happens once a month, two weeks is awkward, and you’ll only hear that if you ask before you write the quote.

Where the price goes

Not right at the back. The reader scrolls straight to it anyway, and if they have to go through four pages to get there they won’t read the rest — by then they’re thinking about the figure.

What works: a short summary at the top with what you’re going to do and what it costs, and the detail after it. Then someone in a hurry reads the first part, and someone who wants the detail carries on.

Put in why the figure is what it is as well. Not as a defence, but as an explanation: what’s included, what isn’t, and what happens if the work overruns. A price with no explanation is just a number to compare.

And then the invoice

A good quote is most of an invoice already, which is the practical reason to get it right the first time. If you’re VAT registered you must issue a VAT invoice when you supply another accountable person, a Department of State, a local authority, a body established by statute, or a person carrying on an exempt activity — among others. And there’s a deadline people miss: “a VAT invoice must issue within 15 days of the end of the month in which goods or services are supplied.”

Revenue’s list of what has to be on it reads, once you strip out the cross-border items, like the list below — and everything on it except the number and the dates is already in a well-written quote. Which is the point: the customer’s registered address is much easier to ask for on the day you’re selling than on the day you want to be paid.

• the date of issue, and the date on which the goods or services were supplied
• a unique sequential number
• your full name, address and registration number
• the customer’s full name and address
• the quantity and nature of the goods, or the extent and nature of the services
• the VAT exclusive unit price, and any discounts or price reductions
• the breakdown by the rate of VAT, and the total VAT payable

The eInvoice that’s coming, and why it belongs in this piece

In 2026 you have to do nothing. No Irish business is required to send a structured eInvoice, and a PDF is a perfectly good invoice today. But Ireland has published its dates, and anyone choosing software now is choosing for the years in which those dates land.

From 1 November 2028, VAT-registered large corporates have to issue eInvoices and report a subset of the data to Revenue in real time. That is a defined and small group — businesses whose tax affairs are managed by Revenue’s Large Corporates Division, established or with a fixed establishment in Ireland, roughly 2,400 of them — and you are almost certainly not in it. Revenue writes to the businesses that are.

The sentence that does apply to you sits on the same date: “all businesses in Ireland must be able to receive structured eInvoices.” There is no size threshold on that one. It means that from November 2028 a large customer can send you an invoice that isn’t a document at all, and your side has to be able to take it in.

The format is a structured electronic one — XML, for example — complying with the European standard EN16931, and Revenue is blunt about what doesn’t count: “unstructured formats such as PDFs or scanned paper documents do not meet the eInvoicing requirement.” Peppol is the default network for sending eInvoices and the mandated route for reporting to Revenue, and Revenue intends to become Ireland’s Peppol Authority from 1 January 2027.

After that, two more steps. From November 2029 the obligation extends to VAT-registered businesses engaged in cross-border EU B2B trade — which catches a lot of small Irish exporters who assume none of this is about them. From July 2030 the full EU ViDA requirements apply to all cross-border EU B2B transactions.

None of this is urgent and all of it is worth one question when you pick a system: what is your plan for 2028, and can you receive as well as send? Treat “we produce a nice PDF” as an answer about today. We’re not going to promise you that any particular product, this one included, will be ready on the day — nobody can honestly promise that two years out. Ask the question anyway, and ask it again in 2027.

What to record when you send it

At the moment the quote goes out: the amount, the validity date, and when you’ll ring. Those three, and a task with a date on it.

That’s the piece of work finished. What happens after that — and that’s where most of the revenue disappears — is in the piece on following up a quote. What to do when the invoice goes unpaid is in payment terms and late payers.