ERP Business Analyst, Singapore

Specifying GST and InvoiceNow in the requirements

GST sits with the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS), and InvoiceNow, the national e-invoicing network built on Peppol, is becoming part of how GST-registered businesses exchange invoice data. Requirements and timelines in this area have been evolving, so confirm what applies to your company with IRAS guidance and your tax advisor rather than relying on any summary, including this one.

For a BRD, I break the topic into specific statements that a vendor must answer and a tester can check:

• A tax code for every supply type you actually make, including any treatment of imported services your advisor confirms.
• Customer and supplier master data: UEN, GST registration number and Peppol participant ID, validated when the record is created.
• Outbound invoices and credit notes generated as structured data and sent through an access point, with delivery status visible to users.
• Inbound supplier invoices received through InvoiceNow, matched to purchase orders and receipts before approval.
• What happens when a transmission fails, and who is told.

Each platform's route to InvoiceNow, native or through an access point provider, becomes its own line in the fit-gap. I do not give GST advice; I document what your advisor confirms. More on the method is on my ERP requirements gathering page.

Capturing requirements for regional entities

Many Singapore companies are the head of a group with operations in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines or further away. Requirements gathering often focuses on the Singapore entity because that is where the project sponsor sits, and the subsidiaries discover their needs during rollout.

I avoid that by running a short discovery with each regional entity early. For every one, I record the local tax and invoicing obligations that their accountants identify, statutory reporting and audit needs, the local currency and banks, payroll arrangements, the language users work in, and which processes they would accept from a group template. The result is a requirement matrix by entity, showing what is common and what is local.

Group-level requirements are written separately: intercompany sales and management fees, shared services, consolidation in SGD, and the data your finance team prepares for transfer pricing documentation under advisor direction. This makes it possible to judge honestly whether one ERP should serve the whole group or whether some subsidiaries are better on a local system feeding consolidation. The comparison is done through my ERP gap analysis, and selection support sits on my ERP consultant page for Singapore.

Industry requirement patterns I see in Singapore

Singapore's economy is broad, but a few business types recur in ERP projects, each with its own requirement shape.

• Trading and commodity firms need contract-based purchasing and sales, multi-currency pricing, shipment and document tracking, and exposure reports by product and counterparty.
• Third-party logistics providers need warehouse and transport operations linked to billing: storage charges, handling fees and accessorial charges calculated from activity data and invoiced per customer contract.
• Technology and SaaS companies need subscription billing, deferred revenue schedules and usage or seat changes mid-term, plus a clean link between CRM, billing and the ledger.
• Professional services firms need projects, timesheets, milestone billing and resource utilization views.
• Suppliers to the public sector responding through GeBIZ need quotation and tender records, contract terms and delivery evidence held against each order.

Across all of these, payroll usually runs in a specialist product that handles CPF contributions, so I document what passes between payroll and the ERP rather than assuming it all sits in one place. These patterns are mapped with my ERP process mapping approach.

Remote requirement sessions on Singapore time

Discovery opens with leadership, usually the founder, managing director or regional CFO, to agree goals and the questions the new system must answer. I then interview finance, sales, operations and IT owners, and the people who key transactions every day, because they know the exceptions that break standard processes.

Singapore keeps a Monday to Friday week on Singapore Standard Time, and my working day overlaps comfortably with yours, so live workshops can sit in normal office hours without early or late calls. Regional colleagues join sessions planned for their own time zones. Between calls, I share draft maps and requirements in a common workspace so people can comment when it suits them.

I do not have a presence in Singapore and do not travel there routinely; a visit can be arranged only if it is genuinely useful and agreed in advance. Every area owner signs off their section of the BRD, and decisions are logged so the scope stays stable when vendors start asking questions. For the document format, see ERP BRD consulting, and for my other work in this market, the Singapore overview.