From the SRL's accounts to the IRES it owes

Giulia runs a small engineering workshop in Brescia as an SRL. Her accountant closes the year with a profit of 180,000 € and she assumes the company tax is simply a slice of that figure. It is not. The tax is computed on a different number, reached through adjustments she has never seen, and the difference decides a bill of several tens of thousands of euros.

Who pays IRES

IRES stands for imposta sul reddito delle società, the Italian corporate income tax. It is a tax on the income of entities, not of people. The owner of an SRL does not pay it personally: the company is the taxpayer, files its own return and pays from its own bank account.

The Agenzia delle Entrate lists the entities that must pay. The first group names joint-stock companies, partnerships limited by shares, società a responsabilità limitata, cooperatives and mutual insurance companies resident in Italy. The SRL, the usual vehicle of small Italian businesses, therefore sits squarely inside the tax.

The same list continues with public and private bodies resident in Italy, including consortia, trusts, collective investment undertakings and non-commercial bodies. A third group covers companies and bodies not resident in Italy, but only for the income they produce in Italy. This course stays with the resident SRL.

Residence is a matter of fact, not of registration alone. A company is considered resident when, for most of the tax period, it has in Italy its registered office, its place of effective management or its main business activity. An SRL founded and run in Italy meets all three at once.

This separation is the reason IRES matters to a founder. A sole trader pays IRPEF on the business income as personal income. The same activity run through an SRL is taxed first at company level. What the members later receive as dividends follows rules of its own, which this course does not cover.

Registration comes before any of this. The Agenzia explains that a new business registers in the Registro delle Imprese kept by the Chambers of Commerce through the Comunicazione Unica, a single online procedure that also delivers the VAT number and tax code. From that point the company exists for the tax authority.

From accounting profit to taxable income

The starting point is the financial statements. For companies and commercial bodies, the Agenzia states that business income is determined starting from the profit or loss shown in the accounts. The accounts are the raw material; the tax return is where they are reworked into a taxable figure.

The reworking has a name: variazioni in aumento and variazioni in diminuzione, increases and decreases required by tax law. They are applied when the return is prepared, not in the books. The accounts keep showing the profit approved by the members; the return shows what the tax law makes of it.

Why would the two figures differ at all? Because accounting and tax pursue different aims. Accounts seek a faithful picture of the business. Tax law, for its part, limits or defers some costs, excludes some income and sets its own timing. Each gap between the two produces an adjustment in the return.

• Increases add back to the profit items that the accounts deducted but tax law does not accept, or not yet
• Decreases take out of the profit items that the accounts recorded as income but tax law excludes or taxes later
• The result of profit plus increases minus decreases is the business income on which IRES is computed

This course does not list the individual adjustments, and it does so on purpose. They run to dozens of provisions, many with limits that change from year to year. What the owner of a small SRL needs is the mechanism, so that the gap between profit and taxable income stops being a mystery.

The practical consequence is simple. Never estimate the company tax by applying the rate to the profit on the draft accounts. Ask the accountant for the expected adjustments first. A profit of one amount can hide a taxable income noticeably higher, and the tax follows the taxable income, not the profit.

The reverse also happens. When decreases outweigh increases, the business income ends up below the profit, and a tax estimated on the profit overstates what the company owes. Neither direction is safe to assume. The only reliable figure is the one that comes out of the return itself, once every adjustment has been applied.

Non-commercial bodies follow another path, which this course only mentions. For them, the Agenzia explains, total income is the sum of land, capital, business and other income, and the base is found by adding the categories together. An SRL never uses that method: it always starts from its accounts.

A company that is not resident and works in Italy through a permanent establishment is taxed on its Italian income only. Its base is the sum of the income categories produced in Italy, including the business income of the establishment. The distinction matters to a foreign group that opens an Italian branch instead of an SRL.

The ordinary IRES rate

Once the taxable income is known, the computation itself is short. IRES is a proportional tax: a single rate applies to the whole taxable income, with no brackets. That is the main difference from IRPEF, the personal income tax, whose rate rises as income rises.

The Agenzia's page on IRES opens with that single sentence: the rate of the tax on company income is 24 per cent. It applies whatever the size of the company. A two-person SRL and a large industrial group face the same percentage; what differs is the base it is applied to.

The same page immediately adds a warning about a reduced rate, sometimes called IRES premiale. It concerns one tax period only and requires several conditions to be met together. The second module examines it in detail, because it is precisely the kind of relief that is easy to claim wrongly.

On our example, the computation is one line. A business income of 188,000 € multiplied by 24 per cent gives 45,120 € of IRES. Applied to the accounting profit of 180,000 € instead, the rate would have given 43,200 €, an underestimate of 1,920 € built into the owner's cash plan.

ActioFin's IRES calculator applies the ordinary rate to a taxable income you enter, and checks the conditions of the reduced rate when you declare them. It does not derive the taxable income from the accounts. That step, with its adjustments, remains the accountant's work, and the tool says so openly.

Declaring and paying IRES

Every IRES taxpayer files the Redditi SC return each year, SC standing for società di capitali. According to the Agenzia, it is sent by the last day of the tenth month after the end of the tax period. For a company whose financial year matches the calendar year, that means 31 October.

The return is sent online. The Agenzia offers free software, RedditiOnLine SC, and access to its online services requires SPID credentials, the electronic identity card, the national services card or the Fisconline and Entratel credentials. Many companies choose to file through an intermediary who holds Entratel access.

Sending the file is not the end of the procedure. The system first confirms that the file was received. Only after processing the data without finding errors does it send a second message confirming that the return has been filed. Keep both: the second is the one that proves the filing.

The tax itself is paid with the F24 form, the same payment slip used for most Italian taxes. The Agenzia states it in one line at the end of its page on the return. Each amount on an F24 is identified by a tax code, and the code tells the Treasury which tax and which year it pays.

This course does not give the dates or percentages of the advance payments of IRES. They were not read on an official page served in full when the course was written, and a date copied from memory is exactly the error an owner cannot afford. Your accountant's payment schedule is the reference.

Which year's rules this course teaches

The rules described here are those in force in 2026. They rest largely on the TUIR, the consolidated income tax act, which the Agenzia cites for the exemptions of certain funds. The TUIR is repealed from 1 January 2027 by Legislative Decree 117/2026, which reorganises the income taxes into a new text.

This course does not predict what the new text will say. A consolidation can keep a rule word for word, move it or change it, and only reading the new provisions settles which. Until the course is revised against them, treat what follows as the 2026 picture and nothing more.

The same caution applies to the rate itself. The 24 per cent quoted here comes from the Agenzia's page updated on 13 July 2026 and read on 24 September 2026. A rate is a political choice renewed by each budget law; the date of reading is part of the figure.

A simple habit follows from this. Before each filing season, open the Agenzia's page on IRES again and look at its update date. If the date has moved since the last return, read the page in full before reusing last year's working papers: a single new sentence can change the rate applied.

The same goes for the accounts that serve as the starting point. Taxable income inherits every error in the profit: a cost booked in the wrong year shifts tax from one period to another. A tidy year-end close, with complete documents and timely entries, is the first guarantee of a correctly computed IRES.