Trading Online Voucher: what it covers, explained

This is general information, not financial advice. Grant scheme terms and availability change; the specifics below were checked in August 2026 and should be confirmed with your Local Enterprise Office before you apply or spend anything.

The Trading Online Voucher (TOV) is a Local Enterprise Office grant, funded by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, designed to help small businesses develop the capability to trade online, historically worth up to €2,500 at a 50% co-funding rate.

According to official Local Enterprise Office material, the scheme funds specific online-trading capabilities: payment facilities or booking systems added to a website, customer-facing mobile applications, and subscriptions to retail platform software (Local Enterprise Office Dublin City, "Trading Online Voucher/Grant", checked August 2026). It has historically required 50% matched funding from the business and prior attendance at a scheme training seminar.

Unclear and inconsistent across Local Enterprise Office areas as of this research. That's worth stating plainly rather than papering over. Some LEO pages display a specific closure notice, others display scheme content referencing outdated deadlines, and no single up-to-date national confirmation of the scheme's current status was found during this research.

One LEO county page states explicitly: "This scheme closes at 5pm on Friday 13 December 2024" with no applications accepted after that date, and gives no information about a replacement scheme (Local Enterprise Office Cork North & West, closure notice, checked August 2026). Other LEO pages, including one used as a source for this article, still display Trading Online Voucher content referencing a September 2020 deadline, a strong sign that the page hasn't been meaningfully updated and shouldn't be relied on for current terms. Separately, third-party industry commentary describes a newer scheme, the Grow Digital Voucher, as having taken over much of the practical territory the Trading Online Voucher used to occupy, though it isn't a formal one-to-one replacement and has a broader scope than TOV's original online-trading focus (Local Enterprise Office, "What is the Grow Digital Voucher?", checked August 2026). The honest conclusion: check with your own Local Enterprise Office directly for the scheme's current status in your county, rather than trusting any published summary, including this one, to be current.

Historically, the voucher funds online transactional capability specifically: adding payment or booking functionality to a website, building a customer-facing app, or subscribing to a retail platform, not general marketing, hosting, or software unrelated to online trading.

According to official LEO material, explicitly excluded costs have historically included: costs incurred before approval, website hosting on its own, a purely informational "brochure" website with no transactional element, non-internet software purchases, and any activity unrelated to online trading itself (Local Enterprise Office Dublin City, TOV page, checked August 2026). This is a narrow, specific scope by design: the scheme was built to get micro-businesses selling online, not to fund general digital transformation.

Not clearly, and the honest answer is that it wasn't designed for this. TOV's documented scope is online trading capability: payments, bookings, e-commerce platforms, not AI agents, workflow automation, or bespoke software built to run a specific business process.

If your interest is in AI automation rather than building online trading capability, the Trading Online Voucher's traditional scope doesn't fit cleanly, and no official source found during this research states that AI automation work qualifies. The Grow Digital Voucher is the more relevant Local Enterprise Office scheme for AI-adjacent work: its published eligible-expenses list explicitly names "analytics and AI systems" among qualifying software subscriptions, though it also explicitly excludes custom or bespoke software, meaning it would cover an off-the-shelf AI tool subscription more readily than a purpose-built AI employee designed around your specific rules. See AI grants Ireland for the full comparison across schemes, including Grow Digital's specific terms.

Eligibility has historically required a business to be trading for at least six months, be a micro-enterprise (broadly, fewer than 10 employees, though this should be confirmed against current terms), and attend a scheme training seminar before applying.

Given the uncertainty over current scheme status described above, treat these historical criteria as a starting reference point rather than a current, reliable eligibility checklist. Confirm directly with your Local Enterprise Office whether the scheme is running in your area and what its live eligibility terms are.

Probably not as your first move, given the mismatch between the scheme's documented scope and AI automation work. Check the Grow Digital Voucher and Access Advice: Digital Discovery first, and confirm TOV's actual current status with your Local Enterprise Office rather than assuming it applies.

If your business genuinely needs online trading capability (a transactional website, payments, bookings) alongside an AI project, it may be worth pursuing both separately: TOV (if currently available in your area) for the trading capability itself, and a more AI-relevant scheme for the automation work. Don't assume one voucher covers both; ask directly.

For the fuller comparison of Irish AI and digital grants, including which ones more clearly cover AI-adjacent work, see AI grants Ireland, and for the wider picture of how Irish businesses are actually using AI, see AI adoption among Irish SMEs. If a grant does eventually cover part of a build, the work itself still needs mapping, building and running afterwards. See how an AI employee gets built and infrastructure you own for what that involves regardless of funding. If you're weighing up an AI project regardless of grant funding, ask us whether it's worth automating. That conversation doesn't depend on a grant application succeeding.