Day to day
Filing to Revenue
Two kinds of filing: a contract notification once per contract, and a payment notification before every payment. The second is where the money is decided.
On this page
Notifying a contract
Before a subcontractor starts, the contract is notified to Revenue: who they are, the nature of the work, where the site is, the dates, and what it is worth. Revenue returns three things.
The indicative rate is not the rate
It reflects the subcontractor’s standing at that moment and has no authority behind it. Deducting on the strength of it — rather than on a Deduction Authorisation obtained for the specific payment — is one of the errors Revenue names explicitly.
Notify one contract per engagement, not one per invoice. A subcontractor working on three sites has three contracts; the same subcontractor invoicing you monthly for one site has one contract and many payments.
The employment status questions
The contract notification asks a set of questions about how the subcontractor works: whether they supply their own materials, provide their own insurance, decide their own method, engage others, carry financial risk. They are mandatory, and they are not filler.
They map onto the factors the courts use to distinguish genuine self-employment from employment. Revenue has increased its focus on misclassification in construction, and these answers are on record.
Answer them accurately
Answer what is actually true of the arrangement, not what produces a convenient outcome. Brickie deliberately does not draw a conclusion from your answers or hint at what a “good” set looks like — classification is a legal judgement about real working conditions, and if a pattern here worries you, it is a conversation for your accountant.
The delay before you can pay
A contract that Revenue has just accepted is not immediately usable. Send a payment notification too soon and it is rejected with a message about being unable to find details for the contract, even though the contract was accepted seconds earlier.
Brickie retries rather than reporting failure. The delay is variable and outside anyone’s control, so where you know a payment is coming, notify the contract in advance rather than on the day.
Notifying a payment
Before each payment you send Revenue the contract and the gross amount. Revenue replies in about two seconds with the Deduction Authorisation. This is a single round trip — there is nothing to wait for and nothing to come back and check later.
Notice what is not sent: Brickie does not tell Revenue what rate to apply or what it thinks the deduction should be. It sends the gross and asks. Revenue decides.
Reading the authorisation
- The net is what you pay. Not the invoice total. The payment file is built from this figure, never from the invoice.
- The deduction goes to Revenue and is credited to the subcontractor against their own tax. Pass the authorisation details on to them so they can see it.
- Your cost is still the gross. The deduction is the subcontractor’s tax, collected by you, not a discount.
Brickie re-checks that the deduction and net agree with the gross and the rate Revenue applied. If they do not, it flags a discrepancy rather than substituting its own figures — Revenue’s answer stands, and a disagreement is something you need to see rather than have resolved silently.
When a filing is rejected
Revenue returns a reason, and Brickie shows it against the field it relates to. Common ones:
| What Revenue says | What it usually means |
|---|---|
Cannot find details for contract | Usually the propagation delay above rather than a wrong contract ID. Brickie retries. |
Invalid character | Revenue accepts a restricted character set. An em-dash pasted from a document, or an accented character outside the permitted list, will be rejected. Retype the field plainly. |
Invalid signature | Almost always an expired or revoked certificate. See Your ROS certificate. |
Unable to connect to the required web service | Misleadingly worded. It can mean Revenue is genuinely unavailable, but it is also returned for some malformed submissions. If it persists on one filing but others succeed, the filing is the problem. |
Filing several at once
Several payment notifications can be sent together. One thing to know about how Revenue handles a batch:
A batch is all or nothing
If one notification in a batch is rejected, none of them are processed. There is no partial success where the good ones go through and the bad one comes back. Brickie tells you which one caused it, and you correct that one and resend the batch.
Nothing filed in a rejected batch has any effect at Revenue, so there is nothing to unwind — the payments simply have no authorisation yet, and cannot be paid until they do.