Methodology
How we source and verify Irish software data
Every vendor profile on Vendors.ie carries a "Last verified" date. This page explains what that date means, what we check, and how the dataset is kept current.
Sourcing
Where vendor records come from
Vendors are added to the dataset from public Irish business records and the suppliers actively selling software into the Irish market. Irish-incorporated vendors are cross-referenced against the Companies Registration Office (CRO) for legal entity name, registration number, status, and registered address. UK vendors are cross-referenced against Companies House.
Public-sector usage data is sourced from the EU Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) feed and Ireland's eTenders contract-award records, surfaced via our sister site Tenderwatch.ie. Implementation-partner data is verified against vendor partner directories where these are published.
Editorial coverage decisions, including which categories to expand and which vendors to add first, are made by the editor. Vendors cannot pay to be added or to move up a list. See the Transparency page for the full editorial-independence disclosure.
Verification
What "Last verified" means
Each vendor profile carries a Last verified date stamp. On that date, an automated verification pass re-checked the vendor's public website and pricing page and re-confirmed the structured fields the profile is built on. Editorial copy (the verdict, pros and cons, the long-form overview) is reviewed separately on a slower cadence and is not re-stamped by the monthly pass.
The verification pass is a weekly GitHub Actions cron that calls Perplexity's sonar live-web-search model and Anthropic's Claude Haiku as a fallback. It compares each vendor's current public surface against the values stored in the dataset and opens a pull request when it finds drift. A human reviews the pull request before any change merges - no field is updated unattended.
The fields covered by the verification pass are:
- Pricing. Entry-level price, pricing model (per-user, flat, usage, contact), currency, and whether euro pricing is guaranteed. Checked against the vendor's public pricing page.
- Irish compliance booleans. Revenue Online Service integration, PAYE Modernisation support, Irish bank feeds, SEPA Direct Debit, Irish IBAN support, VAT handling, Irish-business-hours support. Checked against the vendor's feature pages and Irish documentation.
- GDPR data residency. EU, US, or both, as published by the vendor.
- Free trial availability. Whether a free trial is offered and the terms attached to it.
- Legal entity. CRO number, status, and registered address for Irish entities, refreshed on a separate weekly cron via the official CRO API.
Where a value cannot be verified from the vendor's public surface, the profile carries a Data estimated or Data pending verification chip and we say so. We do not infer Irish compliance status for a vendor that does not publish it.
Comparisons
How comparison pages are dated
A head-to-head comparison page draws its data from two underlying vendor profiles. Each profile carries its own verification date, so the comparison is only as fresh as the older of the two. The "Last verified" stamp on a comparison page reflects the older date - if BrightPay was re-verified yesterday and Sage on the first of last month, the comparison reads as verified to the older Sage date.
This is deliberately conservative. A reader looking at a comparison should be able to trust that every field shown has been checked at least as recently as the date they see.
Corrections
Flag a correction
Pricing changed, a compliance flag is wrong, or a vendor has gone out of business in Ireland? Email editor@vendors.ie with the vendor name, the field, and a public-source link if you have one. Corrections from vendors and from readers are treated the same - we cite the source, we date the change, and the profile carries the new "Last verified" date once the update merges.
Vendors who want to take ownership of their profile (and add product detail beyond the structured fields) can claim it. Claiming a profile does not change the verification rules - claimed profiles are held to the same evidence standard as the rest of the dataset.
Behind the page
For the curious
Every vendor profile and pillar page also carries a provenance footer with the source URL the verification cron last scraped, the relevant Irish regulator for the software category, our operating entity, and a link to the live Irish compliance matrix. If you want to inspect the raw evidence behind any field, that footer is where to start.