How to keep track of child maintenance payments

Why a record matters, even when things are amicable

Most maintenance arrangements in Ireland are informal, agreed between parents rather than set by a court. That's no bad thing, but it does mean there's often nothing written down anywhere except a bank statement, if that. A simple record, kept as you go, means neither of you is relying on memory if a question ever comes up about what was paid and when.

This isn't about building a case against anyone. It's the same instinct as keeping a receipt: quietly useful, rarely needed, genuinely reassuring when it is.

Ireland's Child Maintenance Calculator

The Department of Justice launched an official Child Maintenance Calculator in early 2026, alongside Ireland's first set of Child Maintenance Guidelines. It's free to use at childmaintenancecalculator.ie and gives an estimate of what maintenance might reasonably look like for your family, as a starting point for a conversation between you, or with a solicitor or family mediator.

It's worth knowing what it isn't: the figure it gives you is a guide only. It's not legally binding, it won't change an existing court order, and nobody is bound to accept the number it produces. Think of it as a sensible opening line, not the final word.

If maintenance goes through the courts

Where a maintenance order has been made by the District Court, the court office keeps its own record of payments received. That's a proper, official record you can rely on if a dispute ever arises, so if your arrangement is court-ordered, you already have a safety net in place. It's still worth keeping your own simple note alongside it, mainly so you're never waiting on someone else's office hours to answer a straightforward question.

If it's a private, family-based arrangement

If you and your co-parent have agreed maintenance between yourselves, without a court order, the record-keeping is entirely down to you. Paying by bank transfer rather than cash is the simplest step: it gives both of you a timestamped, third-party record automatically, without either of you having to do anything extra.

Beyond that, a lot of parents keep a running note, a spreadsheet, or a dedicated tracker so the payment history is somewhere both of you can actually see it, not filed away in one person's private banking app.

How ParenThing keeps the record for you

This is exactly the kind of quiet admin ParenThing was built to take off your plate. Maintenance payments get logged as they're made, visible to both of you the moment they're recorded, so there's no separate spreadsheet to maintain and no month-end reconciliation from memory. If a question ever comes up, the answer is already there, agreed and dated, not something either of you has to go digging for.

It sits alongside the rest of the family's shared record, calendar, documents and expense requests, so maintenance is just one part of an ordinary week rather than a topic that has to be raised on its own.

Keeping the conversation calm

A payment record works best when it's shared and agreed from the start, not introduced after a disagreement, when it can land as an accusation rather than a housekeeping step. Framing it as "let's both be able to see this" rather than "I need to check up on you" tends to make it far easier for both parents to say yes to.