Year-end bookkeeping checklist for Singapore small companies

A year-end bookkeeping checklist for a Singapore company comes down to five jobs. Reconcile every bank and card account to the last day of the financial year. Clear what is owed to you and what you owe. Count and value what you hold. Book the accruals and adjustments your accountant will ask for. Then lock the period so nothing changes after the numbers leave the building. Do them in that order and the filings that follow, the ECI, the annual return and Form C-S, become paperwork instead of archaeology.

The rest of this piece walks through each job, the filing dates it feeds for a company with a 31 December year end, and which parts a bookkeeping assistant can carry for you. It also covers the parts nobody offshore should be deciding on your behalf.

Key takeaways

• Close the books in order: bank reconciliations first, then receivables and payables, then stock and accruals, then lock the period.
• For a 31 December year end, IRAS wants the ECI by 31 March and Form C-S by 30 November; ACRA wants the annual return by 31 July.
• IRAS expects records kept for at least 5 years, so the close is also when you check the paper trail is complete.
• An assistant can do the matching and the chasing. Write-offs, tax positions and sign-off stay with you and your accountant.

The dates the checklist is working towards

Every task on a year-end list exists because a filing later in the year depends on it. If you know the dates, you know how much slack you have. The table assumes a private company that is not listed, with a financial year ending 31 December, and reflects the rules as published by IRAS and ACRA at the time of writing in 2026. Check the official pages if your year end or company type is different.

Filing dates for a 31 December year end

Filing	Goes to	Due	What the books must supply
Employment income (IR8A) under the Auto-Inclusion Scheme	IRAS	1 March	Final payroll totals, bonuses and benefits for each employee
Estimated Chargeable Income (ECI)	IRAS	Within 3 months, so 31 March	Revenue for the year and a reasonable estimate of taxable profit
Annual general meeting	Shareholders	Within 6 months, so 30 June	Financial statements ready to lay before members
Annual return	ACRA	Within 7 months, so 31 July	Financial statements, or the financial information ACRA asks for
Form C-S, C-S (Lite) or C	IRAS	30 November	Final accounts and the tax computation

Two notes on that table. A company can skip the ECI if its annual revenue is 5 million Singapore dollars or less and its ECI is nil, so a loss-making year can mean one less form. And if you are GST-registered, the quarter ending 31 December has its own return, due one month after the quarter closes, which lands in the same week your team is trying to close the year.

The practical point is that the ECI is the first hard date that needs a profit figure. Aim to have the books closed by the end of February, which leaves March for the accountant to estimate.

Job one: reconcile every account to the last day

Nothing else on the list is reliable until the bank balances agree. A reconciliation means the closing balance in your accounting software matches the closing balance on the bank statement for 31 December, with every difference explained.

Which accounts to include

List every account the company has touched during the year, not only the main operating account. Owners forget the second currency account opened for one supplier, the corporate card that a former employee used, the payment gateway that holds a float before paying out, and the petty cash tin. Each one needs a statement and a matched balance.

What usually breaks

Payment gateways are the most common source of trouble. The gateway pays out net of its fees, often days later, so a sale on 30 December may land in the bank in January. Record the gross sale, the fee and the amount in transit separately, or the revenue figure will be wrong by exactly the fees you paid all year.

The second trouble spot is transfers between your own accounts. If one side is booked and the other is not, the books show money that does not exist. Run a report of transfers and check that each one has two sides.

Uncleared cheques and deposits are the third. A cheque you wrote on 28 December that the supplier banked in January is fine, as long as it appears on the reconciliation as an outstanding item. A cheque that has been outstanding since March is a question to ask the supplier.

Job two: clear what you are owed and what you owe

Once cash agrees, turn to the two lists that describe money still moving: receivables and payables.

Receivables

Pull the aged receivables report as at 31 December. For each invoice older than 90 days, decide whether the customer will pay. Send one more reminder before the year closes; a surprising number of old invoices are unpaid because the customer lost the original. Any invoice you are certain will not be paid is a candidate for a bad debt write-off, but that decision has tax consequences and belongs with your accountant, not with whoever is sending the reminders.

Check for the opposite problem as well. Customers who paid twice, or paid before the invoice was raised, show up as credit balances. Those are money you owe back, and they make the receivables total look smaller than it is.

Payables

Match supplier statements against your payables ledger. Ask your three or four largest suppliers for a statement as at 31 December if they do not send one. Differences are usually an invoice you never received or a credit note they never sent. Both change your expenses for the year.

Look for bills that arrive in January for work done in December. Cleaning, utilities, professional fees and contractor hours are the usual ones. Those belong in the year just closed, which is the next job.

Job three: stock, fixed assets and accruals

This is the part of the close where judgement starts to matter, so it helps to separate what can be gathered from what has to be decided.

Stock

If you hold stock, count it as close to 31 December as you can, note the date and who counted, and value it at cost. Anything damaged, expired or unsellable should be listed separately so the accountant can decide whether to write it down. A count done in mid-January can be rolled back, but only if you have the sales and purchases for the days in between.

Fixed assets

List what the company bought during the year that will last more than a year: laptops, furniture, equipment, renovation, each with its invoice attached. Check last year's register too. The laptop that was sold or binned in June is still on it unless someone took it off.

Accruals and prepayments

An accrual records a cost from this year that has not been billed yet. A prepayment records a cost paid this year that covers next year, such as an annual software licence paid in November. Both move expenses into the right year. Your accountant will calculate the final numbers, but they need the list: supplier, what it was for, the period it covers and the amount.

Job four: payroll, CPF and the employment income return

Payroll has its own year-end because its first filing comes before anything else. Under the Auto-Inclusion Scheme, employers submit each employee's employment income to IRAS by 1 March, and IRAS uses it to pre-fill the employee's own tax return.

Before that, reconcile total salaries in the accounts to the payroll system for all 12 months. Then check that CPF contributions paid match what the payroll system says was due. Bonuses declared in December but paid in January, director fees approved at the AGM and benefits in kind such as a company car or housing are the usual gaps. Each one needs a decision on which year it belongs to, and that decision should be written down.

An assistant can prepare the reconciliation and draft the employment income figures. The person who submits them on the IRAS portal should be someone authorised by the company in Corppass, which in a small company is usually the owner or the finance lead.

Job five: lock the period and hand over

Most accounting software lets you set a lock date. Set it to 31 December once the adjustments are in. After that, any change to last year needs someone to reopen the year on purpose, which stops a January invoice being posted into December by mistake three months later.

Then put together the pack your accountant will ask for. It is the same every year, so write it down once as a checklist:

• Trial balance and the general ledger as at 31 December
• Bank reconciliations with statements for every account
• Aged receivables and payables, with notes on anything you want written off
• Stock count sheets and the valuation
• Fixed asset additions and disposals, with invoices
• The accruals and prepayments list
• Payroll and CPF reconciliation
• Loans, director current account movements and any related-party transactions

IRAS requires companies to keep source documents and accounting records for at least 5 years from the relevant Year of Assessment. For you, the close is the cheapest time to check that every transaction above a set amount has a document attached, because the person who knows where the receipt is still works for you.

What a bookkeeping assistant can carry, and what stays with you

Most of the hours in a year-end close go into matching transactions and chasing people for paperwork. That work is a good fit for an offshore bookkeeping assistant who already does your monthly reconciliations, because they know which supplier sends statements late and which gateway pays out on a Tuesday.

A rough way to size the work is to count the bank lines for the year. At about a minute a line to match and query, a company with 200 transactions a month has 2,400 lines, or roughly 40 hours, if nobody reconciled during the year. If the monthly reconciliations were done, most of those lines are already matched and the close shrinks to the adjustments in jobs three to five.

There are parts an assistant should not own. Writing off a bad debt, deciding whether a bonus belongs in this year or next, and the tax treatment of anything unusual change your tax bill, so the assistant prepares the evidence and you and your accountant make the call. The same goes for submitting filings: the person pressing submit on the IRAS or ACRA portal should be authorised by the company and should have read what they are submitting.

When is outsourcing the close a poor idea? If your records are mostly on paper in a drawer, if the year has a restructuring or a large asset sale in it, or if nobody in the company can review the work, start with an accountant rather than an assistant. An assistant makes a good process faster. It does not replace a missing one. Our piece on virtual bookkeeping services covers what the monthly side looks like, and sharing account access safely covers the logins question that comes up first.

Frequently asked questions

When should a Singapore company start its year-end close?

Start in the first week after the year ends, once December bank statements are available. Aim to finish by the end of February so there is time to estimate profit for the ECI, due within 3 months of the year end.

Does every company need to file an ECI?

No. IRAS waives the ECI for a company whose annual revenue is 5 million Singapore dollars or less and whose ECI is nil. Companies above that, or with a taxable profit, file within 3 months of the year end.

How long do I need to keep the year-end records?

IRAS asks companies to keep source documents, accounting records and bank statements for at least 5 years from the relevant Year of Assessment, and the year-end pack belongs in the same folder.

Can a virtual assistant file my annual return or tax return?

They can prepare the figures and documents. The submission should be made by someone the company has authorised in Corppass, who has reviewed what is being filed, and the tax computation should come from a qualified accountant.

Sources

• IRAS: Estimated Chargeable Income (ECI) filing
• IRAS: Record keeping requirements for companies
• IRAS: Auto-Inclusion Scheme for employment income
• ACRA: Deadline and requirements for annual returns

If the monthly books are the problem, fix those first and the year-end gets shorter on its own. If you want to see what a bookkeeping assistant would take off your plate, book a call and bring last year's close as the example.