Bizfile is ACRA’s online company registry and filing portal. It holds the official record of who runs and who owns every Singapore-registered entity, and it is where you lodge changes to that record. It is not where you pay tax.
That last sentence is where most of the confusion starts. Business owners arrive at Bizfile expecting a general-purpose government portal for everything to do with running a company, discover it is nothing of the sort, and then spend an hour clicking through menus looking for something that was never there.
So before you log in for the first time, it is worth being clear about what Bizfile is for, what it is not for, and which of its several hundred functions you will realistically ever touch. For most directors of a small Singapore company, the honest answer is: about six.
What is Bizfile?
Bizfile is the electronic filing and information system operated by the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority. It sits at bizfile.gov.sg and it is the single point of contact between a registered Singapore entity and its regulator for registry purposes.
Two things follow from that, and they matter more than any menu structure.
First, Bizfile is not a copy of your company’s records. It is the record. Since the Companies Act 1967 was amended, the registers that establish who directs and who owns a private company are held electronically by the Registrar. Section 196A makes the Registrar’s electronic register of members the legal register for a private company, and Section 173 does the equivalent job for the register of directors, chief executive officers, secretaries and auditors. What Bizfile shows is what is legally true, whatever your own files say.
Second, because it is the record, filing on Bizfile is not administrative housekeeping that can slip. A change you have agreed commercially but not lodged has not happened as far as the world is concerned, and the clock on lodging it is usually short.
The three jobs Bizfile does
It helps to stop thinking of Bizfile as one system and start thinking of it as three, sharing a login.
It is the register
Every entity’s official particulars live here: registered name, unique entity number, registered office address, business activities, officers, shareholders, share capital, charges, financial year end and status. When a bank, an auditor, a grant assessor or a counterparty wants to know something about your company, this is what they look at.
It is the filing counter
Anything that changes the register has to be lodged through Bizfile, using a named eService. Appointing a director, transferring shares, moving the registered office, filing the annual return, striking the company off: each is a distinct transaction with its own form, its own deadline and, in most cases, its own fee.
It is the information shop
Bizfile also sells business information about other entities, and gives some information away free to the people entitled to it. A Business Profile on a supplier you are about to extend credit to is a paid product. Your own company’s statutory registers are free if you are a current officer or member, which is a genuinely useful entitlement that most directors never use. We covered exactly how to pull them in our guide to downloading your company registers free from Bizfile.
What you cannot do in Bizfile
This is the part ACRA’s own orientation material tends to skip, and it is the part that saves you the wasted hour. Singapore’s government services are deliberately split across agencies, and Bizfile only covers ACRA’s slice.
| What you are trying to do | Is it Bizfile? | Where it actually happens |
|---|---|---|
| File your annual return and update the register | Yes | Bizfile |
| Register a new company, business name or LLP | Yes | Bizfile |
| Buy a Business Profile on another company | Yes | Bizfile |
| Pay corporate income tax, file ECI or Form C-S | No | IRAS myTax Portal |
| Register for GST or file a GST return | No | IRAS myTax Portal |
| Apply for an Employment Pass or S Pass | No | MOM’s work pass systems |
| Apply for a business licence or permit | No | GoBusiness Licensing |
| Register a trade mark | No | IPOS |
| Create or administer your Corppass account | No | corppass.gov.sg |
| Store board minutes, contracts or management accounts | No | Nowhere government-run. That is your own record keeping |
The Corppass line is the one that catches new companies. Corppass controls who is allowed to act for your entity across all government digital services, and it is administered separately from Bizfile by a different part of government. If Bizfile will not let you in, the fix is almost never inside Bizfile. Our guide to setting up Corppass for a new Singapore company walks through the administrator setup, and logging in to Bizfile as a business user deals with what to do when the login itself fails.
Which transactions will you actually touch?
Bizfile carries a long catalogue of eServices, most of which exist for liquidators, corporate service providers, public accountants and entity types you do not have. Strip those out and a typical owner-managed private limited company deals with a short list.
| Transaction | How often | Deadline discipline | Who usually files it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annual return | Once a year | Within 7 months after financial year end for a private company, under Section 197 of the Companies Act 1967 | Corporate secretary |
| Change of officers (appoint, resign, change particulars) | As it happens | 14 days | Corporate secretary |
| Change of registered office address | Rarely | 14 days | Corporate secretary |
| Change in shareholding (transfer, allotment) | As it happens | 14 days | Corporate secretary |
| Change of business activities (SSIC code) | Rarely | 14 days | Corporate secretary or director |
| Change of financial year end | Once, if ever | Before the deadline for the relevant year | Corporate secretary |
| Free download of your own registers | Whenever you like | None | You, directly |
| Buying a Business Profile on a counterparty | Ad hoc | None | You, directly |
| Striking off | Once, at the end | Not applicable | Corporate secretary |
Two observations about that table.
The right-hand column is mostly “corporate secretary” for a reason. Every Singapore company must appoint one, and in practice the secretary holds the filing knowledge and the Corppass access. That does not mean a director should be blind to the process. It means the director’s job is to notice that something has changed and tell someone, not to key the form.
The 14-day pattern repeats deliberately. Most changes to the register carry a 14-day lodgement window, and missing it attracts late lodgement penalties charged per late transaction. A company that lets three changes drift for a year does not pay one penalty. It pays three.
What goes wrong
Three failure modes account for most of the damage we see, and none of them is about not understanding the software.
Assuming the filing happened. A director signs a share transfer, hands it to whoever handles the company’s admin, and never checks. Six months later a grant application or a bank facility turns on the shareholding and ACRA still shows the old position. The transfer was legally effective between the parties, but the register was not updated, and the register is what everyone else relies on. The cure costs two minutes: pull the free register of members and read it.
Treating Bizfile as an archive. Bizfile holds what has been lodged. It does not hold your board resolutions, your shareholders’ agreement, your minutes, your constitution amendments as working documents, or your management accounts. Companies that let their own record keeping lapse on the assumption that “it is all in Bizfile anyway” discover the gap at exactly the wrong moment, usually during due diligence. Our note on restoring statutory registers and records covers what that repair job looks like.
Filing on the wrong entity. If you hold positions in more than one company, Bizfile will happily let you file against whichever entity your session is currently pointed at. A misdirected filing is a real filing, and unwinding it means a second transaction, a second fee and an awkward explanation. Part 2 of this guide deals with how to check before you click.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need my own Bizfile login if I have a corporate secretary?
It is worth having. Your secretary files on your behalf, but a director with access can read the register, download it free, see pending actions and confirm that filings actually went through. It costs nothing and it is the cheapest form of oversight available to you.
Is Bizfile the same thing as Corppass?
No. Corppass is the government’s authorisation system: it decides which individuals may act for your entity across government digital services. Bizfile is ACRA’s registry and filing portal. You use Corppass to get into Bizfile as a business user, but Corppass itself is administered elsewhere.
Can I file everything myself and skip the corporate secretary?
You can file most things yourself, but you cannot skip the appointment. Every Singapore company must have a company secretary, and the role carries real obligations. What you can sensibly do yourself is the reading: registers, profiles, dashboard alerts.
Does Bizfile tell me when something is due?
Partly. Your dashboard shows messages from ACRA, pending actions and recent transactions, and ACRA does issue reminders. It is not a compliance calendar, and it will not chase you. Treat any alert as a prompt, not as the full picture of what you owe.
Is my company’s information on Bizfile public?
Core registry information about a Singapore entity is publicly purchasable, which is the trade-off for limited liability. Residential addresses can be shielded by using an alternate address, and some registers, such as the register of registrable controllers under Part XIA of the Companies Act 1967, are not open to general public purchase.
Where to go from here
If you take one thing from this piece, take this: Bizfile is the register, not a filing cabinet, and the register is what other people believe. Everything else is menu navigation.
Part 2 of this guide, your first fifteen minutes in Bizfile, covers getting in, finding your entity, reading the dashboard and the handful of things worth doing on day one. If your problem is that you cannot get in at all, start with logging in to Bizfile as a business user instead.
Raffles Corporate Services acts as company secretary for several hundred Singapore companies. We file the changes, we watch the deadlines, and we reconcile ACRA’s record against yours before every year end, so that the question “did that actually get filed?” stops being one you have to ask. If you are not sure where your company currently stands, that is a short conversation.
You can reach us through Raffles Corporate Services, or read more on Singapore corporate secretarial practice at Singapore Secretary Services.
— The Editorial Team, Raffles Corporate Services