Choosing Accounting Software for a Singapore Business

Choosing accounting software used to be mostly a question of price and ease of use. For a Singapore business it is now also a compliance question, because what your software can and cannot do determines whether you are able to meet your GST obligations at all.

Do You Need Software Yet?

Not necessarily. A business with modest transaction volumes can run perfectly well on spreadsheets, and our accounting workflow guide includes free templates for invoicing, receivables, payables, expenses and payroll.

The point at which spreadsheets stop being enough is usually GST registration, rather than a particular size or turnover. That is where the requirements below start to bite.

What to Look for in Singapore

GST-compliant tax invoices. If you are GST-registered, a plain invoice is not sufficient. Your software needs to produce a proper tax invoice showing your GST registration number and the GST charged, generally issued within 30 days of the time of supply, because your GST-registered customers rely on it to claim their input tax.

InvoiceNow capability. Since 1 April 2026, all new voluntary GST registrants must transmit invoice data to IRAS through the InvoiceNow network, and other GST-registered businesses follow progressively from 1 April 2028. If you expect to register soon, this is a hard requirement rather than a feature to compare. Our GST guide covers who is affected and when.

Filing that connects to IRAS. Some software can submit GST returns and corporate income tax forms to IRAS directly through its APIs, which removes a manual re-keying step every quarter. IRAS’s Accounting Software Register Plus listing shows which products have been assessed against its tiers.

Payroll and CPF, if you employ people. Payroll handling needs to cope with CPF contributions and with issuing itemised payslips, which the Employment Act requires for nearly all employees.

Records you can still reach in five years. Business records have to be kept for at least five years, and if you change software IRAS still expects the transactions recorded in the old system to remain retrievable for the rest of that period. Check how easily a product lets you export readable copies before you commit to it, not after. Our guide on how long to keep business records sets out the retention rules.

Availability in Singapore. Obvious, but worth confirming first, as the next section shows.

A Note on Wave

Wave is a cloud accounting tool aimed at freelancers and small businesses, and this page recommended it for years. Three things now make it a poor fit for a Singapore business.

Availability. Wave prices its plans only in US and Canadian dollars and is widely reported to accept only US and Canadian businesses. It publishes no list of supported countries on its own site, so confirm directly with Wave before planning around it.

Pricing structure. It is no longer a single free product. A free Starter plan remains, but a paid Pro plan now sits above it, and features the free tier once included, such as automatic bank transaction imports, have moved into the paid tier. The advertising-funded model this page used to quote, where partner offers inside the product paid for the software, is no longer how Wave operates.

Local compliance. Wave does not appear on IRAS’s Accounting Software Register Plus listing, so it is not among the products assessed for filing GST returns or corporate income tax forms directly to IRAS. Software built for other markets will not support InvoiceNow either, which GST-registered businesses here are progressively required to use.

None of that makes Wave a bad product. It does mean software built for other markets will not handle Singapore GST or InvoiceNow, which for a GST-registered business here is decisive.

Where LUCA Fits

We should be straightforward about our own position. Enston built and runs LUCA, a Singapore accounting platform, rather than reselling someone else’s. It exists because we are an accounting firm first, and we wanted our accountants working inside the same system as our clients’ books.

That is a reason to take our recommendation with the appropriate pinch of salt, and also the reason we care about the criteria above. Current plans and pricing are on luca.pro.

Practical Takeaway

Start with the compliance requirements rather than the feature list. If you are GST-registered or close to it, InvoiceNow capability and proper tax invoices are the tests that matter, and they rule out a good deal of otherwise capable software built for other markets.

Before committing, confirm the product is available in Singapore, that it can file to IRAS if you want that, and that you can get your data out in readable form when you eventually move on.