How to Set Up InvoiceNow E-Invoicing in Xero (Singapore Guide)

Short version: InvoiceNow is Singapore's national e-invoicing network, run by IMDA on top of Peppol. Instead of emailing a PDF that someone re-types at the other end, your accounting system sends structured invoice data straight into your customer's accounting system. IRAS has made it mandatory in phases, and if you are on Xero you connect through the Invoici app using your UEN and Corppass. It is a one-time setup of roughly twenty minutes.

This guide covers the compliance deadlines you are actually on the hook for, the click-by-click Xero setup, how your Peppol ID works, and the handful of things that go wrong in practice.

What InvoiceNow actually is

InvoiceNow is the nationwide e-invoicing framework run by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). It runs on Peppol, an international network already used across Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

The distinction that matters: an e-invoice is not a PDF attached to an email, and it is not a scanned document. It is a structured data file that travels over a secure network directly between two accounting systems. Nobody re-keys anything.

IMDA estimates roughly $8 in savings per invoice, and research cited by Xero puts the time saved at 59% for senders and 64% for recipients versus paper-based processing. For a business issuing a few hundred invoices a month, that is real money and real headcount hours.

The deadlines you are actually on the hook for

This is the part most business owners get wrong, because the rollout is phased and the phase you fall into depends on when you registered for GST and how large your supplies are.

Two things to take from that table. First, if you are registering for GST voluntarily now, this already applies to you — there is no grace period left. Second, if you are an established GST-registered business, your date is somewhere between 2028 and 2031 based on your annual supplies, and IRAS has been notifying businesses of their specific dates from mid-2026 onward. Check your correspondence rather than assuming you are in the last wave.

The submission scope covers tax invoices, credit notes, aggregated cash sales and aggregated petty cash purchases. Full current detail sits on the IRAS GST InvoiceNow Requirement page, which is the authoritative source and worth checking before you plan any migration.

What you need before you start

Gather these first — the setup stalls if any one is missing:

• A Xero Starter, Standard or Premium plan. E-invoicing is included at no extra cost on all three, but it is not available during a free trial.
• Your company's UEN (Unique Entity Number), exactly as registered with ACRA.
• Corppass access with authority to act for the business, and the Singpass app on your phone for the QR scan.
• Admin or standard-plus-payroll level access to the Xero organisation.

The most common blocker is the Corppass one. If the person doing the setup is not authorised in Corppass for the entity, the authorisation step fails at the last moment. Sort that out in Corppass before you begin, not during.

Setting up InvoiceNow in Xero, step by step

Xero connects to the Peppol network through Invoici, an accredited access point provider. You are not signing up for a separate paid product — this is the plumbing that puts your Xero organisation on the network.

1. Open the Invoici integration page. Go to connect.invoi.ci/signup/integrate and click Connect to Xero.
2. Authorise the connection. Sign in to Xero, select the organisation you are registering, and click Allow Access. If you manage several entities, take a moment here — connecting the wrong organisation is annoying to unwind.
3. Verify your company details. Invoici pulls your organisation details from Xero and shows them for confirmation. Check the UEN character by character. This is the single field that must be perfect, because your Peppol ID is derived from it and a wrong digit means invoices route to nobody.
4. Accept the declarations. Tick the required declaration checkboxes and click Confirm Details.
5. Authorise with Corppass. Click the Corppass button, then scan the QR code shown with your Singpass app. This proves you are authorised to register the business on the network.
6. Receive your Peppol ID. Registration completes and you are issued a Peppol ID and an Invoici email address. Your ID takes the Singapore form 0195:SGUEN<your UEN>.

That is the whole registration. Once it is done, e-invoicing is live on that Xero organisation — there is nothing to renew and no monthly add-on to manage.

Understanding your Peppol ID

Your Peppol ID is your address on the network, the way an email address is your address on email. In Singapore it looks like this:

0195:SGUEN200912345A

  0195       -> the Singapore scheme identifier
  SGUEN      -> Singapore UEN prefix
  200912345A -> your actual UEN

Two practical consequences. First, publish it — put your Peppol ID on your invoice template, your website contact page and your supplier onboarding forms, exactly as you would a bank account number. Suppliers cannot send you e-invoices without it.

Second, when addressing an invoice through the Invoici email route, you write the recipient's ID as an email address with the colon replaced by a hyphen, followed by @invoi.ci:

Peppol ID:  0195:SGUEN200912345A
Send to:    0195-SGUEN200912345A@invoi.ci

Getting that colon-to-hyphen swap wrong is the most common day-one mistake. The invoice appears to send from Xero and then simply never arrives.

Sending your first e-invoice

1. Collect the customer's Peppol ID. Ask for it during onboarding, alongside their billing address and payment terms.
2. Store it on the contact record in Xero, so nobody has to look it up again for the next invoice.
3. Raise the invoice as normal. Nothing about your invoicing workflow changes — same fields, same approval.
4. Send it to their e-invoicing address rather than their usual accounts inbox.
5. Confirm delivery. A network-level failure is reported back, so an invoice that "went quiet" almost always means a wrong ID rather than a silent loss.

Receiving e-invoices

This is the half that saves the most time, and the half people forget to plan for. Supplier e-invoices arrive in Xero as draft bills, already populated with the line items, amounts and GST.

Your accounts payable process changes shape accordingly:

• Nobody types supplier invoices any more — the data arrives structured.
• Your team's job shifts from data entry to review: check the bill against the purchase order, assign the correct account code and tracking category, then approve.
• Because bills land the moment they are issued, your payables ageing becomes accurate in real time rather than lagging by however long the inbox backlog is.

Worth saying plainly: this is a genuine change to how a finance team works, not a software toggle. The coding and approval discipline matters more once the typing disappears, because a mis-coded bill now flows through faster than it used to.

What goes wrong in practice

Funding and support

Government support exists to offset adoption costs, and it is worth checking before you spend anything. Transitional funding has been made available to encourage early adoption — reported in the range of up to S$1,000 for SMEs and up to S$5,000 for larger businesses — alongside free InvoiceNow-ready solutions for SMEs running until March 2031. Schemes and amounts change, so confirm current eligibility on the IMDA and IRAS pages rather than relying on any figure quoted in an article, including this one.

A sensible rollout plan

Do not do this the week before your deadline. A workable sequence:

1. Find your date. Work out which phase you fall into from the table above, and check for an IRAS notification.
2. Fix Corppass first. Confirm who is authorised to act for the entity before you touch Xero.
3. Register and get your Peppol ID. Twenty minutes, once.
4. Publish your ID everywhere — invoice template, website, supplier onboarding form.
5. Pilot with one friendly customer and one supplier. Send one, receive one, watch what actually happens.
6. Agree your coding rules for incoming draft bills before volume arrives.
7. Train the team on review rather than entry. This is the step most often skipped, and the one that determines whether you get the time saving.

Learn Xero properly, with funding

Connecting to InvoiceNow is the easy part. Getting clean, reliable financial statements out of Xero once invoices are flowing in automatically is the skill that actually pays — bank reconciliation, chart of accounts design, GST treatment and the reporting that sits on top.

Our WSQ - Advanced Transactional Accounting with Xero course is a 2-day, 16-hour hands-on programme covering double-entry accounting in Xero, company and chart of accounts setup, sales and purchase transactions, bank reconciliation, financial reporting and budgeting, plus the accounting standards that govern how your statements are prepared. It now also covers InvoiceNow e-invoicing setup and the GST InvoiceNow requirement, so you leave able to connect and operate it rather than just having read about it.

Because it is a WSQ course, the funding is substantial:

• Up to 50% SSG course fee funding for Singaporeans and PRs aged 21 and above
• Up to 70% for Singaporeans aged 40 and above (MCES) and for eligible SMEs
• SkillsFuture Credit claimable to offset the remaining fee
• SFEC, PSEA, UTAP and Absentee Payroll available depending on eligibility

If you are at a different starting point, the related courses may fit better: Basic Accounting using Xero for beginners, CASL - Xero Essentials for SMEs for small business owners handling their own books, WSQ - Advanced Transactional Accounting with QuickBooks Online if you run QuickBooks instead, and AI for Accounting for automating the review work that remains.

Frequently asked questions

Next steps

1. Work out which InvoiceNow phase applies to you and check for an IRAS notification
2. Confirm Corppass authority for whoever will do the setup
3. Register through Invoici from Xero and note down your Peppol ID
4. Publish your Peppol ID and pilot with one customer and one supplier
5. Book WSQ - Advanced Transactional Accounting with Xero and learn the full Xero workflow with up to 70% WSQ funding

Compliance dates and funding schemes change. This article reflects published guidance at the time of writing — always confirm your specific obligations against the IRAS GST InvoiceNow Requirement page and the Xero e-invoicing guide.