Resources
Practical guides for Singapore bookkeeping
Working guides rather than marketing pages — written for Singapore SMEs, with IRAS and Peppol as the reference points.
Eight guides in this index
- GST filing
- checklist
- InvoiceNow & Peppol
- explainer
- Year-end close
- checklist
- Receipt capture
- guide
- New companies
- guide
- Expense categories
- guide
- Bank feeds & reconciliation
- habits
The index, read as a ledger.
Every guide below is written for a Singapore SME running its own books or reviewing what an accountant produced. Some are checklists to run against a live filing; others are explainers on the parts of the workflow that decide whether the checklist works. Where a guide quotes a rule, IRAS and Peppol are the sources.
Guide 01 · GST filing
The GST filing checklist
A GST return should be a review, not a rebuild. The difference comes down to whether tax codes were applied when transactions were categorised.
This checklist walks through what needs to be true before you prepare a return: correct tax codes on revenue and expenses, reconciled bank accounts for the period, treatment of zero-rated and exempt supplies documented, and any credit notes accounted for in the right period. Each of those is a fact you can verify from the ledger, not a judgement call you make on filing day.
It also covers the common errors: transactions categorised without a tax code, expenses claimed without supporting documents, and period-end adjustments made in the following period. Each one is small alone and expensive in combination.
Guide 02 · E-invoicing
InvoiceNow and Peppol explained for SMEs
InvoiceNow is Singapore's e-invoicing framework. Peppol is the structured network that carries the documents between businesses. What changes in practice is not the content of the invoice — it is that the invoice moves as structured data rather than as a PDF.
What changes on your side
- Invoices post directly into the ledger as structured data, without a second keying pass.
- Manual entry drops away on both sides of the transaction.
- Counterparties still send and receive through their own systems; the invoice just arrives in a format software can read.
Who feels it first
- Businesses issuing high invoice volumes, where keying time is the real cost.
- Businesses whose larger counterparties are already on the network.
- Everyone else: a small business issuing a few invoices a month has less immediate pressure, though the direction of travel is clear.
If your volumes are low today, the useful step is preparation rather than adoption: check that your chart of accounts and tax codes can accept a structured invoice cleanly, so switching later is a configuration change rather than a project.
Guide 03 · Close
Year-end close checklist
Year-end is straightforward when twelve monthly closes were kept current, and painful when they were not.
This checklist covers what to prepare: reconciled bank accounts through the year end, outstanding receivables and payables reviewed, fixed asset additions and disposals documented, accruals and prepayments identified, and stock counted where it is relevant to your trade.
The guide also covers the handoff. What your accountant or auditor will ask for, in roughly the order they ask for it, and what to have ready so year-end becomes a consolidation rather than a research project.
What your accountant will ask for, in order
- 1 Bank statements and reconciled ledgers through year end.
- 2 Aged receivables and payables, with notes on the ones you expect to settle late.
- 3 Fixed asset register, with additions and disposals dated.
- 4 Accruals and prepayments, with the reasoning behind each month's split.
- 5 Stock count sheets, where stock applies to your business.
- 6 Any document that explains a figure someone will ask about — a contract, a signed approval, a loan schedule.
Guide 04 · Receipt capture
Receipt capture without the chase
Most receipt capture failures are behavioural rather than technical.
Staff do not submit because it is a second app with a separate login, or because nothing happens when they do — no confirmation, no match, no acknowledgement. Both are fixable, and neither is fixed by a better camera.
This guide covers what actually works: submission by WhatsApp, email, or app upload using channels people already use daily, and same-week submission so matching happens automatically instead of in a month-end queue.
It also covers what to do with the receipts that never arrive: chasing at month end, adjusting where documents genuinely cannot be produced, and setting a threshold below which chasing costs more than the deduction is worth.
Same-week submission is what makes automatic matching work; a month-end queue is what makes it fail.
Guide 05 · First year
Bookkeeping for new Singapore companies
First-year companies face a specific set of decisions. This guide covers them in the order they typically arise, with the honest answer that some can wait and some cannot.
When to register for GST
Registration turns on taxable turnover crossing the threshold. Registering early can be voluntary; registering late cannot. The decision to watch is whether your customer base is GST-registered itself, because that determines whether the tax is a cost or a pass-through.
Chart of accounts
Set once, read every month. A short chart that matches how the business actually makes money beats a comprehensive taxonomy nobody queries.
In-house or managed
Depends less on transaction count than on how much of the ledger has to be explained to someone else. A founder who is the only reader can keep a simpler book.
When a spreadsheet stops working
Usually the moment more than one person records transactions, or the moment a single transaction needs two fields of context to make sense later.
The one that cannot wait
Record structure. Transactions captured with the right fields are easy to make compliant later. Transactions captured without them are a project.
Guide 06 · Categorisation
Expense categorisation guide for SMEs
Categorisation is where bookkeeping judgement shows.
A laptop may be an asset or an expense depending on how it is used and for how long. Client entertainment and staff welfare sit in different places for tax. Payments to related parties are not ordinary supplier costs, and treating them as such changes the story your accounts tell. This guide sets out the categories Singapore SMEs most often get wrong, and why the treatment differs.
It also covers the pattern worth avoiding: a chart of accounts with 140 rows that nobody reads, producing reports nobody uses. Fewer categories, correctly applied, serve decision-making better than a comprehensive taxonomy.
A laptop for a new hire
Asset if it is expected to serve for more than a year; expense if it is genuinely short-lived. The answer is not the price of the laptop — it is whether the business expects the machine to still be in use next year.
Client dinner vs. staff lunch
Entertaining a client and feeding your own staff are not the same line, and Singapore tax treatment does not treat them the same. The record has to say who was there and why.
Payments to a related company
A director's own side company is not an ordinary supplier. The basis of the charge — a service, a loan, a dividend — decides which line it belongs to and whether it needs disclosure.
A chart with 140 rows
Precision feels reassuring but rarely survives contact with the person entering the transaction. Twelve categories applied consistently carry more useful reports than 140 applied sporadically.
Guide 07 · Bank feeds & reconciliation
Xero bank feeds and reconciliation habits
Bank feeds reduce manual entry, and the habit they enable matters more than the feature.
A feed connected and never checked is a faster way to record the wrong thing. This guide covers connecting feeds, handling the accounts where a feed is unavailable, and running reconciliation as a weekly routine rather than as a month-end event.
The weekly routine is flexible: it can be fifteen minutes on a Friday, or a queue reviewed when it hits ten items. What it cannot be is a set of exceptions discovered on the day the VAT return is due.
The three exceptions worth watching
Transfers between your own accounts recorded as income or expense. The money did not leave the business; the ledger should not act as though it did.
Duplicate transactions from a reconnected feed. Usually harmless when caught early; a mess when caught at year end.
Payments that post without a matching document. A short queue catches all three early, and a weekly review keeps the queue short.
The reference points
Where the rules come from
Every guide in this index runs on two public references and one private one. The public references are IRAS — for GST rules, filing windows, and the treatment of zero-rated and exempt supplies — and Peppol, the structured network behind InvoiceNow. The private reference is your own ledger, and that is the one that decides whether the guide is useful or decorative.
None of the guides here claim to override a specific IRAS ruling, and none of them avoid it either. Where a rule changes, the guide follows. Where the rule leaves room, the guide says so, and points at the decision the business has to make.
The month closes when the last line reconciles.
If you would rather not run the guides yourself, the work we do for Singapore SMEs covers the same ground — bank feeds, GST-ready workflows, InvoiceNow connectivity, and the monthly report that closes the month.
Ask about InvoiceNow readiness
Bring the invoice volume and the counterparties you deal with, and we will say whether adopting InvoiceNow now is worth it or a later configuration change.
Frequently asked, briefly answered
Do these guides replace an accountant?
No. They cover the parts of the workflow that decide how much an accountant has to fix — record structure, tax codes, categorisation, and what year-end actually asks for. The filings themselves still belong to whoever is qualified to make them.
Are the guides specific to Singapore?
Yes. The GST filing checklist and the year-end close checklist follow IRAS practice; the InvoiceNow and Peppol guides describe the Singapore framework. Where a general bookkeeping principle is used, it is applied to a Singapore context rather than restated in the abstract.
What should I read first?
If you have a GST return due in the next quarter, start with the GST filing checklist. If your financial year ends in the next three months, start with the year-end close checklist. If you are within the first year of trading, start with the guide for new Singapore companies — record structure is the decision that compounds.
Can LedgePoint run the workflow with us?
That is what the managed side of LedgePoint is for: cloud accounting software plus a real bookkeeper on the other side of the same ledger, covering bank feeds, GST-ready workflows, and InvoiceNow connectivity. You can also keep it DIY and use the guides as reference — the page comparing the two sits on the site.
Not sure which guide applies? Write to the team at LedgePoint with the month you are on and what is open, and we will point at the right one.