If you have just registered a business, filed an annual return or renewed a registration, ACRA gives you a free Business Profile. It is delivered as an attachment to your Bizfile inbox within fifteen minutes of a successful filing, and it stays available for 60 days.
Raffles Corporate Services works with a panel of experienced Singapore law firms who offer cost-effective and efficient legal service and advice. This article is general information only and is not legal advice.
After that it is gone, and the same document costs $5.50.
This is a transaction-linked freebie, not a standing entitlement. It attaches to the filing, it goes to the person who filed, and it has an expiry date. Each of those three facts causes a different problem, and all three are avoidable.
Which filings earn a free profile
The entitlement is triggered by completing an eligible transaction successfully. Broadly, three families of filing qualify.
| Filing family | What counts | Who typically does it |
|---|---|---|
| Business registration | Registering a new entity: sole proprietorship, partnership, limited partnership, limited liability partnership, local company, foreign company branch, public accounting firm, or a variable capital company | Founders, or a corporate service provider on their behalf |
| Annual filings | Annual returns for local companies, foreign companies and LLPs; annual declarations for LLPs; annual returns for VCCs | Company secretary, director or CSP |
| Renewal of registration | Renewing a sole proprietorship, partnership or limited partnership registration | Owner or partner, or a CSP |
Ordinary changes do not qualify. Appointing a director, changing the registered office, lodging a share allotment or updating a business activity are all filings, but they are not on the list. If you want a profile after one of those, you buy it.
Who the free copy actually belongs to
It belongs to whoever filed. Not to the company, not to the directors as a class, and not to whoever happens to log in next.
The filer might be:
- an individual who filed directly for their own entity
- a corporate service provider that filed on the entity’s behalf
- a group secretary filing for entities in a group structure
This is the source of the single most common complaint about this entitlement. A founder incorporates through a corporate service provider, hears that a free Business Profile comes with incorporation, logs in to Bizfile and finds nothing. Nothing is broken. The profile went to the filer’s inbox, because the filer made the filing.
If your CSP files for you, ask them for the profile. It is a reasonable thing to ask for, and a competent provider will already have sent it to you with the rest of the incorporation pack. If you are choosing a provider, it is a fair question to raise at the outset.
How to claim it
- Complete the eligible filing and wait for confirmation that it succeeded. A filing that is pending approval has not triggered anything yet.
- Log in to Bizfile as the filer. Business users go through Corppass, individual filers through Singpass.
- Open your Bizfile inbox. The free Business Profile arrives there as an attachment, normally within fifteen minutes of the successful filing.
- Download it. Do this on the day, not when you next remember.
- Save it somewhere the company will still be able to find it in two years: the corporate records folder, not a personal desktop.
The VCC exception
Variable capital companies are on a different rail. For eligible VCC transactions the free Business Profile is not delivered into a Bizfile inbox: an email containing a download link goes to the lodger’s email address instead. If you file for a VCC and find nothing in the inbox, check the lodger’s email before concluding that something went wrong.
This is not the same as free company registers
There are two separate free routes in Bizfile, and mixing them up leads people to pay for things they already have.
| Free Business Profile after a filing | Free company registers | |
|---|---|---|
| What triggers it | A completed eligible transaction | Being a current officer or member of the entity |
| Who gets it | The person or firm who filed | Every active director, CEO, company secretary and shareholder |
| How often | Once per eligible filing | Unlimited, no cap, no expiry |
| Where you get it | Bizfile inbox, as an attachment | The free business products area of the entity’s Bizfile page |
| Time limit | 60 days from notification | None |
| What you get | A Business Profile of the entity | Register of members, register of directors and similar registers |
The second column is a different article. If you are a director, company secretary or shareholder and you want your company’s registers rather than its profile, read our guide to downloading your company’s registers from Bizfile for free. That entitlement is permanent, it does not depend on having filed anything, and most companies underuse it badly.
And if neither route gets you what you need, buying a Business Profile is the fallback at $5.50.
What goes wrong in practice
The 60 days run out. This is the big one. A company files its annual return, the free profile lands in the inbox, nobody looks at the inbox, and four months later the bank asks for a current Business Profile. Sixty days is generous by the standards of government download windows and still not long enough to survive a busy quarter. Treat downloading it as the last step of the filing, not a separate task.
Nobody knows the Bizfile inbox exists. It is a genuine message centre inside the platform, and for most Singapore SMEs it is checked roughly never. If your company files its own annual return, put “check the Bizfile inbox and save the free profile” in the same checklist as the filing itself.
The CSP filed, so the client never sees it. Covered above, and worth repeating because it accounts for most of the confusion. Ask your provider.
The profile is treated as proof of something it is not. What you receive is an uncertified Business Profile. It is official and it is dated, but where a court, an overseas registry or a foreign bank asks for a certified extract, that is a separate ACRA product with its own fee. Check what the requesting party actually needs before you send the free copy and wait a fortnight to be told it is not enough.
Waiting on a filing that has not gone through. The entitlement attaches to a successful transaction. If your annual return was rejected, or your incorporation is sitting with a referral authority for approval, there is no profile yet and nothing has gone wrong. Confirm the filing status first.
Use it as a filing check, not just a document
The free profile has a second use that most people never think of, and it costs nothing extra.
Open it the day it arrives and read it against what you believe to be true. The profile reflects what ACRA holds immediately after your filing. If a director you appointed two months ago is missing, if the share capital is wrong, or if the registered office is still the old address, you have just found a filing gap while it is still cheap to fix.
Changes to officers and shareholders must be lodged with ACRA within 14 days, and late lodgement penalties apply per late transaction, so several drifting changes accumulate into a bill that surprises people. Catching a missed filing in the week you file your annual return is a much better outcome than catching it during a due diligence exercise.
If you are still finding your way around the platform, start with what Bizfile actually is and what you can and cannot do in it, then your first fifteen minutes in Bizfile and, for a newly incorporated company, setting up Corppass from UEN to first Bizfile login.
Frequently asked questions
Which ACRA filings come with a free Business Profile?
Three families qualify: registering a new business entity of any type including a VCC, filing an annual return or annual declaration for a company, foreign company, LLP or VCC, and renewing a sole proprietorship, partnership or limited partnership registration. Routine changes such as appointing a director or changing the registered office do not qualify.
How long do I have to download the free Business Profile?
Sixty days from the notification landing in your Bizfile inbox. After that the download is no longer available and the same document costs $5.50 to buy. The profile itself normally appears within fifteen minutes of a successful filing, so the practical advice is to download it the same day.
My corporate service provider incorporated my company. Where is my free profile?
With them. The entitlement belongs to whoever filed the transaction, so if a CSP or group secretary lodged your incorporation, the profile went to their Bizfile inbox rather than yours. Ask them to forward it. A well-run provider includes it in the incorporation pack without being asked.
Is the free Business Profile the same as the one I would pay for?
Yes in content. It is the same Business Profile product, delivered because of the filing rather than because of a purchase. Like the paid version, it is an official but uncertified document. If someone has asked you for a certified extract, that is a different ACRA product with its own fee.
I am a director. Can I get a free profile whenever I want one?
Not through this route, which is tied to filings. But as an active director you do have a separate and permanent free entitlement to your company’s statutory registers through the free business products area of Bizfile, with no cap and no expiry. That is usually the information people actually want.
What happens for a VCC?
Variable capital companies use a different delivery method. Rather than an attachment in the Bizfile inbox, an email with a download link goes to the lodger’s email address. Check that inbox, including the spam folder, before assuming the entitlement did not come through.
The version of this that never goes wrong
Every one of the failure modes above comes down to the same thing: a document arrives somewhere nobody watches, with a clock running on it.
Raffles Corporate Services files annual returns and registrations for several hundred Singapore entities, pulls the free profile the day it appears, reads it against the client’s own records, and files it in the corporate records pack rather than an inbox. If your last annual return was filed by someone who did not send you the profile afterwards, that is worth a short conversation, and it usually surfaces something else.
You can reach us through Raffles Corporate Services, or read more on Singapore corporate secretarial practice at Singapore Secretary Services. ACRA’s own guidance on information products sits on acra.gov.sg.
— The Editorial Team, Raffles Corporate Services
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