Everyone’s Watching 6 October. Your Costs Went Up on the 1st.

Budget 2027 lands on Tuesday 6 October. Between now and then, every business page in the country will run the same story: what might change, what might be cut, what small firms are hoping for.

Here’s the part that doesn’t need a Minister’s signature.

On 1 October, five days before the Budget speech, every PRSI rate in the country rises by 0.15%. Employer PRSI goes from 9% to 9.15% on weekly earnings up to €552, and from 11.25% to 11.4% above it. Already legislated. Not a proposal — a date in your payroll calendar.

You can’t vote it down. But there’s a second set of costs in your business that no Minister sets and no Budget touches. Most owners have never counted them.

The number that should bother every Irish SME owner

The Chartered Accountants Ireland / GRID Finance sentiment survey, published in May 2026, found 84% of Irish SMEs reported rising operating costs and 71% were more pessimistic about the economy than six months earlier — up from 54%.

Grim enough. But this is the figure I keep coming back to:

47% of SMEs said they needed help with energy costs. Fewer than 10% had applied for it.

Read that twice. Nearly half of Irish small firms are under enough pressure to say out loud that they need support — and more than three-quarters of those never filled in the form.

The schemes may well be clunky; half of respondents said existing supports are ineffective. But underneath that number is a pattern I see in almost every business I walk into: waiting has quietly become the strategy. Waiting for the Budget. Waiting for energy prices to drop. Waiting for the quiet month that never lands.

The three costs a Budget can’t reach

When I spend a day inside a small Irish business, the money is never leaking where the owner expects. It’s in three places, all invisible from the office.

Rework — anything done twice because it wasn’t right first time. The re-issued invoice, the corrected order, the second site visit. It never appears as a line item; it gets absorbed into “that’s just how it goes”.

Waiting — work sitting still. The quote waiting on a price, the job waiting on a signature. You pay wages, rent and insurance the whole time nothing moves, and the accounts can’t tell an hour of work from an hour of waiting.

Duplication — the same information typed into three systems, the report nobody reads, the spreadsheet shadowing software you already pay for. Irish research last year found 73% of SMEs frequently enter the same employee data more than once.

Now the uncomfortable arithmetic. Take ten people on €40,000. The PRSI increase costs that business roughly €600 a year. Give each of those ten just two hours a week of rework, waiting and duplication — conservative; I’ve never found less — and that’s 1,040 hours, or about €20,000.

One of those numbers will be on every radio show in the country for three weeks. The other is thirty times bigger and nobody will mention it.

The 90-minute pre-Budget margin audit

Do this yourself before you pay anyone — including me — to do it for you. Block ninety minutes. Phone off.

1. Pick your one main process — the thing that turns a customer request into money in the bank. The most common one, not the most complicated one.
2. Walk it, don’t imagine it. Follow it from first contact to payment and talk to the person doing each step. What you think happens and what actually happens are different documents.
3. Mark every stop — every point where work sits waiting on someone or something. Write down how long, honestly.
4. Mark every redo. Ask each person: “what do you end up doing twice?” They’ll tell you instantly. They’ve been waiting years for someone to ask.
5. Put a number on the top three. Minutes × frequency × weeks. Chase the order of magnitude, not precision.
6. Fix one before the Budget speech. Not all of them. One — biggest number, shortest fix, done by 6 October.

Most owners who do this properly find four to twelve hours a week hiding in a single process. Then work in this order: delete what nobody reads, capture information once at source, connect the tools you already pay for — and automate last. Automating a broken process just produces the wrong answer faster, on a monthly subscription.

Frequently asked questions

When is Budget 2027 in Ireland? Tuesday 6 October 2026, delivered by Minister for Finance Simon Harris and Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers.

What is the employer PRSI rate from October 2026? From 1 October 2026, 9.15% on weekly earnings up to €552 and 11.4% above it — a 0.15% rise across all PRSI classes, legislated before Budget 2027 and applying regardless of what the Budget contains.

How can a small business cut costs without cutting staff? By removing rework, waiting and duplication from its core process. These go unmeasured in almost every SME and typically cost more than any external increase. A structured walk-through of one process usually finds four to twelve hours a week.

Where I come in

Get in contact tom@efficiencydoctors.ie and tell me the one process that’s driving you mad and I’ll tell you straight whether it’s worth a day of my time.

EfficiencyDoctors — I give owners their week back. Practical efficiency for owner-run Irish businesses. Working across the west of Ireland and nationwide.

---