QuickBooks Online Singapore: one Delivered label hides two e-invoice channels

QuickBooks Online users in Singapore are working through a national e-invoicing mandate that arrives as two separate obligations, not one. Intuit’s help hub for the Singapore market lays out both, along with the workflow that satisfies them. The detail most likely to trip a careful bookkeeper sits in the status column. A single label, “Delivered”, can cover two transmissions: one to your buyer, one to the tax authority.

Two programs behind one label

InvoiceNow is the delivery half. It moves an invoice between accounting systems over the Peppol network, replacing emailed documents with a structured, system-to-system exchange. GST InvoiceNow is the reporting half. It sends your invoice data to IRAS, the tax authority, for GST purposes, and it is this half that carries the legal mandate.

The two are linked but run independently. QuickBooks requires InvoiceNow to be in place before you can add GST InvoiceNow. You can leave the GST side off until you are ready. It becomes compulsory only once your business crosses the revenue threshold attached to your phase of the mandate.

The mandate arrives in phases

Singapore’s requirement rolls out in phases, each keyed to a revenue band. The cutoffs and dates are set by IRAS, not by the accounting software, and they tighten as each phase begins. Intuit’s Singapore help hub includes a phase table that maps a business onto that timeline. We are not reprinting the figures here. They shift between phases, and a number quoted today could mislead you next quarter. What the hub does establish is the ordering that catches people out: delivery first, tax reporting second, one status word for both.

What does Delivered actually confirm?

Inside QuickBooks, both channels display as “Delivered” when they succeed. The label on its own cannot tell you whether both ran. Select “See details” on the status instead. A fully processed invoice shows two references there: an IRAS acknowledgement ID and a Peppol acknowledgement ID. Seeing both proves the document reached your buyer and the tax authority. One without the other means a channel is still outstanding, and that is the gap you want to catch before you file.

Sending an invoice, two buyer situations

The government sorts e-invoice submissions into numbered types, and the hub maps each type to an action. Type 1A applies when your buyer is already on InvoiceNow. Use “Save and send e-invoice”; the invoice travels over Peppol and the IRAS report files automatically, with both acknowledgement IDs appearing under the details view. Type 2A applies when your buyer has no Peppol presence. The same command applies, and the software falls back to reporting to IRAS only. Delivery to that buyer then happens outside the network. No separate manual submission is needed in either case.

Why is accepting a bill not the whole job?

Type 1B is the receiving side, and it needs two deliberate actions. An inbound bill arrives from a supplier on InvoiceNow. Review it and accept it, which returns an “Accepted” response to the supplier through the network. Acceptance alone reports nothing to IRAS. Reporting is a separate step, “Save and report to IRAS”, taken afterwards. Users who treat the acceptance as the end of the job leave the tax side undone. Both steps live on the same bill, which is why the miss is easy to make.

InvoiceNow comes first

If you have enabled nothing yet, sequence matters. Turn on InvoiceNow before anything else, since the GST channel depends on it. Add GST InvoiceNow when your phase, or your caution, demands it. The hub presents the capability as built into an existing QuickBooks Online subscription rather than a separate purchase, so the work involved is configuration, not procurement.

The practical habit is simple. Treat “Delivered” as the start of verification, not the end of it. Open the details, look for both acknowledgement IDs, and on inbound bills remember the second command. The revenue bands and the dates belong to IRAS. The workflow belongs to you.