May 2025

Auto-Enrolment start postponed, Food business and micro business difficulties, and Enterprise Ireland's Five-Year Plan.

Author

Drew Shiel
May 30, 2025

Welcome to the May edition of HTH Accountants’ monthly newsletter! We send this out once a month with information for our clients and friends about financial news in Ireland. We might have had our summer already, but hopefully there’ll be something good for the upcoming June bank holiday. If you need to know more about anything in this newsletter, we’re available on (01) 541 1446 to talk!

Auto-Enrolment Start Date Postponed

Minister for Social Protection, Dara Calleary TD, announced that the collection of contributions for the Automatic Enrolment retirement savings system called “My Future Fund” will begin from 1st January 2026. It had previously been planned to begin contributions from 30th September 2025.

150 Food Business Closures

The Restaurants Association of Ireland (RAI) unveiled the findings of its Cost of Doing Business 2025 survey, highlighting the mounting financial pressures facing restaurants and hospitality businesses across the country. The pressure on the sector continues to result in closures, with 150 restaurants, cafés, gastropubs and food businesses shutting their doors in the first three months of 2025 alone.

Enterprise Ireland Launches New Five-year Strategy

Enterprise Ireland’s recently launched a new strategy sets out ambitious targets to increase jobs in companies supported by Enterprise Ireland to 275,000 and to increase exports to €50bn by 2029. Its ambition over the next five years is to support Irish exporting companies to make an even greater contribution to the Irish economy through international growth and nationwide employment, with the long-term ambition that exporting Irish companies become the primary driver of the Irish economy.

Accounting Causes Stress to Micro Businesses

Micro businesses spend 10 weeks a year trying to sort out their finances and accounting compliance is one of the most stressful tasks. The most time-consuming finance task is accounting, which takes the smallest businesses 1.7 hours a week, equating to more than one week a year spent solely on keeping the books.

Feel free to forward this newsletter on to colleagues and contacts who might find it useful. They can also subscribe, if they want to get further issues. We’ll talk to you again in June!