Singapore e-Invoices in QuickBooks Online: Sending, Tracking, and Status Checks
Singapore sellers can send e-Invoices from QuickBooks Online via InvoiceNow and report to IRAS, once customer records hold a UEN and Peppol ID.
Singapore users of QuickBooks Online who send invoices through InvoiceNow, the national Peppol network, keep hitting a familiar set of snags. Invoices refuse to submit. Statuses look finished when only half the work is done. The accepted answer to this question maps the full path from creation to tracking, and most of the fixes turn out to be small ones.
The workflow applies to QuickBooks Online accounts in Singapore. The vendor’s own help material still carries a note that the capability is being switched on across subscriptions in stages, so some accounts may not see the options yet. Where it is live, three things decide whether an invoice moves: the customer record, the save option you pick, and the channel setup on the account.
Customer records decide whether an invoice submits
Two fields control everything at the start. Every customer record needs a Unique Entity Number (UEN) and a Peppol ID before an invoice will submit. The accepted answer is blunt about it: if either is missing, the invoice simply will not go. Users who filled in those fields found their invoices cleared on the next attempt. The e-Invoicing feature itself has to be set up on the account first.
Two send buttons, two different jobs
Open the Create menu, marked with a plus sign, and choose Invoice. Pick the customer, then fill in the service date, product or service, quantity, rate, and amount as usual. A text field lets you spell out customer payment options when you need to. The choice that matters sits at the bottom of the form.
Save and send e-invoice does both jobs. It pushes the invoice onto the Peppol network toward your buyer and reports it to IRAS, the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore. Save and report e-invoice does only the reporting half. Your buyer receives nothing through the network, so you send a copy yourself by email or another route.
The buttons you see depend on which channels are enabled. An account running plain InvoiceNow without GST InvoiceNow gets delivery only from Save and send e-invoice, with no IRAS reporting at all. That is the sharpest trap here. An invoice can reach the buyer, show as delivered, and never have been reported.
There is also a fallback. When your buyer is not on InvoiceNow, Save and send e-invoice drops to reporting to IRAS only, and the buyer receives nothing through the network. Plan on a separate copy by email.
Out-of-scope invoices skip the tax report
Invoices where every line carries an out-of-scope (OS) or out-of-purchase (OP) tax category code behave differently. QuickBooks Online still delivers them through InvoiceNow, but it excludes them from GST reporting because those transaction types sit outside the GST net. Only the Save and send e-invoice option appears for such invoices. That is by design, not a fault.
Does a Delivered status mean IRAS has the invoice?
No, and the accepted answer leans hard on this point. Delivery and reporting run as separate tracks with separate indicators. Delivered or Accepted tells you the buyer received the document, nothing more. Reporting has its own status, and you check the two independently in the same panel.
Tracking lives three menus deep. Open All apps, choose Sales & Get Paid, then Invoices, and open the invoice in question. Expand the E-invoice activity section and read the status column, which shows Validated or Rejected. An invoice that validates without sending can be opened and sent from there. A rejection comes with prompts inside QuickBooks Online, and the fix is to work through those prompts rather than resend and hope.
How long do statuses take to update?
Peppol delivery statuses typically move within minutes to a few hours. If an invoice shows no movement after a few hours, the accepted answer sends you back to the E-invoice activity section to look for an error instead of waiting longer. Reporting runs on its own track, so a gap between the two statuses is normal and not, by itself, a sign of failure.
Where should you look first when it breaks?
We would check three places in order. If an invoice will not submit, look at the UEN and Peppol ID on the customer record. If the send options look wrong or missing, check which channels are enabled on the account. If a status seems stuck, give it a few hours, then read the activity panel for the specific error. Nearly every failure in this workflow traces back to one of those three spots.