In any business, having a solid accounting system is essential for monitoring the business’s finances. It helps you track income, expenses, assets, and liabilities, and keeps a handle on cash flow so there’s always enough cash on hand to run the business. It also makes income tax filing far less time-consuming, since accurate, up-to-date records are readily available.
Setting up an accounting system can feel daunting if you have no accounting background. The good news is that you can get started with nothing more than a few simple spreadsheet templates. Below are templates to help you begin tracking your business’s transactions.
Sales Invoice
Businesses providing goods or services need to issue customers a sales invoice — an essential accounting tool that keeps a record of each sale.
The two templates below can be customised to fit your business: add your company details, payee information, payment instructions, and an itemised list of the goods or services provided, along with the quantity and price of each item.
Service invoice template Product invoice templateIf your business is GST-registered, a plain invoice is not enough. You must issue a tax invoice showing your GST registration number and the GST charged, generally within 30 days of the time of supply, because your GST-registered customers need it to claim their input tax. IRAS’s guidance on invoicing customers sets out the particulars a tax invoice must show.
Monthly Sales Report
If your business is in F&B or retail, where sales transactions tend to be voluminous, use the template below to track daily sales, payment methods, credit card charges, and the dates sales proceeds are banked into the company’s account.
Diligently compiling daily sales into a monthly report is useful if you need to report gross sales figures to your landlord, or if you require your monthly gross sales audited by an external auditor.
Monthly Sales ReportAccounts Receivable Ledger
When a business sells goods or services to a customer on credit, it’s important to keep track of what’s owed and follow up on collection. The template below helps you track outstanding amounts, so collection efforts can be prioritised for amounts that are significantly overdue.
Account receivables templateProforma Invoice
If you need to issue a sales document for goods or services you haven’t yet supplied, a proforma invoice lets you quote prices to your customer ahead of delivery. It is a quotation-style document rather than a demand for payment.
A proforma invoice is not a tax invoice. A GST-registered customer cannot use one to support an input tax claim, because input tax must be claimed on the basis of the tax invoice issued by the supplier. Issue a proper tax invoice once the goods or services have actually been supplied.
Accounts Payable Ledger
Businesses often make large purchases — inventory, supplies, or equipment — on credit, resulting in several payments owed to different vendors on different dates. The template below helps you track the amount owed to each vendor and its due date, and gives a quick overview of your total outstanding balances.
Accounts payable templateExpense Report / Reimbursement Report
An expense report template is useful for tracking business expenses incurred by an individual, department, project, or the company as a whole. You can record expense details quickly and conveniently, and ask your team to submit a monthly reimbursement report as expenses are incurred.
Reimbursement report templatePayroll
As your business grows, you may hire an employee or a freelancer. You’ll first need to determine whether that person is an employee or an independent contractor.
For employees, maintain a payroll schedule and ensure your business complies with Singapore’s tax and CPF regulations. In addition, since 1 April 2016, all employers must issue itemised payslips to employees covered by the Employment Act — see MOM’s guidance for the detailed requirements on what to include, and when and how to issue them. In practice this reaches nearly all employees, including managers and executives, following the Employment Act changes that took effect on 1 April 2019. MOM sets out who the Act covers.
If you hire an independent contractor instead, you’ll need to keep track of how much you pay each freelancer.
Payroll schedule template Payslip templateWhen Spreadsheets Are No Longer Enough
Spreadsheets are a sensible starting point for a small business with modest transaction volumes. There are three points at which they stop being enough.
You are approaching GST registration. Registration becomes compulsory once your taxable turnover for the calendar year exceeds S$1 million, or once you reasonably expect it to exceed S$1 million in the next 12 months. Our GST guide sets out both tests and the deadlines that follow.
You register for GST. Since 1 April 2026, all new voluntary GST registrants must transmit their invoice data to IRAS through the InvoiceNow network, and other GST-registered businesses follow progressively from 1 April 2028. Spreadsheet templates cannot do that, so invoicing has to move to software that supports InvoiceNow. IRAS’s GST InvoiceNow Requirement page sets out who is affected and when.
Your volume outgrows manual entry. Once you are reconciling hundreds of transactions a month, software is faster and less error-prone than spreadsheets, and it makes meeting your record-keeping obligations considerably easier. IRAS’s Accounting Software Register Plus listing is a useful place to start looking for software that integrates with IRAS for filing.
Whichever tools you use, keep your records for at least five years. Our guides on how long to keep business records and record-keeping for self-employed persons cover what to keep, and who remains responsible if the business closes.
Conclusion
Starting a business often comes with plenty of obstacles, and accounting can feel like one of the more overwhelming ones. Use the templates above to get started recording your business’s common transactions — they’re straightforward to use and easy to customise to your needs. With the right templates in place, keeping your business’s finances in order is far less tedious than it might seem.