Bank feeds & reconciliation · Singapore
Every posted line earns its mark.
Bank feeds and reconciliation: keeping cash visible. A bank feed is the shortest path between what happened in your bank account and what your accounting system believes. This page explains how feeds work in practice for Singapore businesses, which connections come up most often, and how to build a routine that survives a busy month.
What this page covers
What a bank feed actually does
The retyping goes away. The thinking stays.
The feed pulls transaction lines from your bank into the accounting system: date, description, amount, and direction. It does not categorise them for you, and it does not know which invoice a payment settles. That remains your job, or your bookkeeper's, and it is the part that turns raw lines into a reconciled ledger.
Think of the feed as removing the retyping, not the thinking. The value is that you are matching against reality rather than against a statement you transcribed by hand, which is where transposition errors usually enter the books.
The Singapore connections
Name your bank and account before you commit.
DBS, OCBC and UOB come up in nearly every Singapore comparison, followed by other local and international banks depending on the business.
Availability is platform-specific and sometimes account-specific: a business current account may connect where a multi-currency account does not. Before you commit, name your actual bank and account type and ask for confirmation, not a general statement that "major Singapore banks are supported." Also ask how the connection is authenticated and what happens when your bank requires a fresh login.
Reconciliation: matching, not just importing
A customer payment matches an invoice.
Reconciliation is the act of pairing each bank line with the transaction it represents. A customer payment matches an invoice; a bank charge matches an expense; a transfer between your own accounts matches both sides. Anything left unmatched at month end is a question you are carrying forward.
Most platforms suggest matches and learn from your corrections. Speed comes from how well your invoice references and your chart of accounts are set up, so clean data entry pays off twice.
When a feed breaks
The failure mode is silence.
Feeds break. Banks change authentication, sessions expire, and a connection can pause without notifying anyone. The symptom is a gap: transactions stop appearing on a certain date, and if nobody notices, the ledger silently drifts from the bank.
Set a weekly check specifically for this. Compare the latest transaction date in the feed against today, and investigate anything more than a few days stale. A five-minute habit catches the problem while the missing period is still short enough to fix easily.
A routine that survives a busy month
Two speeds, not daily discipline.
Daily reconciliation is not realistic for most SMEs. Weekly is. The routine works because it has two gears, not because it demands daily attention.
Multi-currency & overseas
Two rates, one line, and the difference.
If you invoice in USD or pay suppliers abroad, your feed will carry foreign-currency lines and your bank will apply a rate. The platform has to record the transaction at one rate and the settlement at another, and the difference lands in an exchange gain or loss.
Ask how the platform handles this before you have a year of it. Some do it cleanly with a rate table; some leave you to adjust manually, which gets painful at scale.
What good cash visibility looks like
Not a dashboard. Three answers.
Good visibility is not a dashboard. It is being able to answer three questions without opening a spreadsheet: how much cash is available today, what is owed to you and overdue, and what is scheduled to leave the account this month. A reconciled feed plus a clean accounts receivable list answers all three.
Question 1
How much cash is available today?
A reconciled feed reads the closing balance against your bank.
Question 2
What is owed to you and overdue?
A clean accounts receivable list separates current from overdue.
Question 3
What is scheduled to leave this month?
Upcoming bills and transfers sit in the ledger, not a spreadsheet.
If answering those takes an hour of assembly, the issue is usually reconciliation lag rather than reporting. Fix the routine before adding reports.
Common connections
Which connections we hear about.
A plain list, not a logo wall. Each row is a real bank or connector SMEs ask about when they start wiring bank feeds into cloud accounting in Singapore.
Permissions, security & who can see the account
Bank data is the most sensitive material in the system.
Roles
Limit who sees balances
Role-based permissions should let you limit who sees balances and who can post entries. Period locking stops a closed month from changing after review.
Multi-factor authentication
Enable it for every user
It is the single highest-value security step available for bank-feed access, and it costs nothing but a few seconds per login.
Next steps
Turn the routine into a habit this week.
This page is one part of a free guide. The integrations guide lists what connects to what; the platform selection framework walks through the questions to ask before you commit to a system.
Guide
Integrations & Workflow
What connects to what, in plain text.
Framework
Platform Selection Framework
The questions worth asking before you sign.
Companion guide
How GST & InvoiceNow Works
Where bank feeds meet GST reporting and invoice delivery.
Questions about the routine or the numbers? Contact the editorial team.
Questions we hear
Four answers before you start.
Which Singapore banks support bank feeds?
DBS, OCBC, and UOB are the connections most commonly referenced in Singapore comparisons, with other local and international banks varying by platform. Support can also differ by account type, so confirm your specific bank and account with the vendor rather than relying on a general list.
How often do bank feeds refresh?
Refresh frequency depends on the platform and the bank connection, ranging from near-real-time to once daily. More important than the interval is whether the platform alerts you when a connection stops working, since a silent gap is the failure that causes real damage.
Do I still need to reconcile if the feed imports everything?
Yes. The feed imports transactions; reconciliation matches them to the invoices, bills, and entries they represent. Unmatched lines at month end mean your profit figures and your cash position are both estimates rather than records.
Is it safe to connect my bank account to accounting software?
Connections are typically made through the bank's authorised channels rather than by sharing your login credentials. Ask the vendor how authentication works, restrict access with roles, and enable multi-factor authentication for every user. Do not connect an account you are not prepared to have visible to your bookkeeping team.