Singapore data guide
How to Use ACRA Registry Data for B2B Prospecting (Legally)
Every company, sole proprietorship, and LLP in Singapore exists in one authoritative place: the register maintained by the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA). For a B2B team selling into Singapore, that register is the cleanest top-of-funnel data source available, far more reliable than scraped international databases. This guide covers what ACRA makes public for free and what sits behind paid Bizfile products, how to read a UEN, how SSIC codes turn the register into an ICP filter, the outreach triggers hiding in incorporation data, and where the PDPA boundary sits when you enrich registry records with contact details.
Last reviewed 11 June 2026 · This guide is general information, not legal advice.
What ACRA publishes free, and what is gated
The free layer is the Bizfile directory search at bizfile.gov.sg. Search any entity name or UEN and you get the basics at no cost: the registered entity name, UEN, entity type, registration status, and registered address. That is enough to confirm a company exists, is live, and is the entity you think it is. ACRA also publishes open datasets of corporate entity information through data.gov.sg, which is how data teams work with the register at scale without scraping.
The gated layer is the paid Business Profile, an official extract that costs S$5.50 per entity and adds the substance: directors and officers, shareholders and share capital, full principal activity descriptions with SSIC codes, and key filing history. Entities also receive a free copy of their own profile after registering or filing annual returns, but for researching other companies, the paid extract is the product.
For prospecting, the split is convenient. The free layer answers existence, status, and identity, which covers most list hygiene. The paid layer answers ownership and officers, which you only need for deals worth real diligence: enterprise opportunities, partnerships, or credit decisions. Few outbound teams need to spend S$5.50 per lead; every outbound team should be using the free layer.
What a UEN tells you before anyone picks up the phone
The Unique Entity Number is Singapore's universal business identifier, and its format leaks useful information. Local companies registered with ACRA carry a 10-character UEN whose first four digits are the year of incorporation, followed by five digits and a check letter: 201912345A is a company incorporated in 2019. Sole proprietorships and partnerships carry 9 characters, and other entity types such as LLPs carry a T or S prefix plus the year, as in T22LL0056C for an LLP registered in 2022.
Company age is the immediately actionable signal. A 2025-prefixed UEN is a young company with young-company needs: accounting, banking, insurance, first hires, first software stack. A 199x-prefixed UEN is an established business where the conversation is replacement and consolidation, not first purchase. Segmenting messaging by UEN-derived age costs nothing and lifts relevance.
The UEN is also your deduplication key. Company names get re-entered into CRMs in a dozen variations; the UEN never does. Keying Singapore accounts on UEN keeps enrichment, list imports, and reply attribution attached to the same entity over time. Our UEN explainer covers the format variants in full detail.
SSIC codes as ICP filters
Every registered entity declares its principal activities using the Singapore Standard Industrial Classification, a five-digit code hierarchy maintained by the Department of Statistics. Because the codes are structured, they make far sharper ICP filters than the free-text industry fields in most sales databases.
Concrete examples: 62011 is development of software and applications, so it isolates Singapore's software builders from the broader tech-services pool. 70201 is management consultancy services, the code carried by thousands of boutique consultancies. 62090 catches other IT and computer service activities such as disaster recovery. If you sell to F&B, logistics, or construction, each has its own code families, and filtering at the five-digit level gets you to the sub-segment your product actually fits.
Two caveats keep SSIC filters honest. The codes are self-declared at registration and rarely updated, so a company that pivoted in year three may still carry its year-one code. And many entities register a generic or holding-company code that says little about real operations. Treat SSIC as a high-recall first cut, then verify with the company's website or LinkedIn before the list goes anywhere near a campaign.
New incorporations as outreach triggers
Singapore registers thousands of new entities every month, and each one is a timestamped buying signal. A freshly incorporated company needs a corporate bank account, an accountant or corporate secretary, insurance, an office or co-working space, and its first software subscriptions, all within months of the registration date sitting in the public record.
The craft is matching the trigger to your sales motion. Corporate services firms want week-one contact. SaaS and equipment vendors do better at the 3-to-6-month mark, when the company has revenue and headcount. Recruiters watch for incorporations whose SSIC codes imply hiring-heavy models. Combining incorporation date with SSIC code gives you a continuously refreshing, pre-qualified list that your competitors mostly ignore in favour of stale databases.
A new incorporation also writes your opening line for you. Referencing that a company registered in March and asking how they are handling a problem your product solves is specific, verifiable, and obviously researched, which is exactly what separates relevant outreach from spam under Singapore's outreach rules.
Entity status as list hygiene
The register records whether each entity is live, struck off, dissolved, or winding up, and that single field is the cheapest list-quality upgrade available. Emailing companies that no longer exist wastes sends, and the hard bounces from their dead domains damage the sender reputation that your deliverability depends on.
The scale of the problem is bigger than most teams assume. When we compared a popular international sales database against the ACRA register, a meaningful share of its Singapore records pointed at entities that were struck off, renamed, or never matched a registered entity at all. The full numbers are in our Apollo versus ACRA comparison, but the headline is simple: international databases decay, the registry is ground truth.
Operationally, validate against the register at two points: once when a list is built, and again on a recurring cycle for any account older than a quarter in your CRM. Suppress anything not in live status. It is a few minutes of work with a UEN lookup, and it routinely removes the worst-bouncing segment of a list before it can hurt you.
The PDPA boundary when you enrich registry data
Registry data about an entity, its name, UEN, status, address, and activities, is information about a company, not about an individual, so Singapore's PDPA does not restrict using it for prospecting. The boundary appears when you move from the company to the people in it.
Officer and shareholder names in a paid Business Profile are personal data. Used in a business context, a director's name and role generally function as business contact information, which section 4(5) of the PDPA exempts from the consent obligations, but the registry does not give you email addresses, and this is where teams go wrong. A work email you find or infer must itself qualify as business contact information lawfully sourced: a corporate-domain address tied to the person's role is fine, while a personal Gmail or a number scraped from a private listing is not covered by the exemption.
The clean pattern is registry-first enrichment: establish the company from ACRA data, identify the right role, then source that person's corporate contact details from legitimate providers or public professional profiles. Keep a record of where each contact came from, and run the resulting campaigns under the same PDPA and Spam Control Act rules as any other Singapore outreach, covered in our Singapore cold email guide.
Doing it manually vs doing it with HuntSales
Everything above can be done by hand: directory searches one entity at a time, the data.gov.sg datasets in a spreadsheet, SSIC filtering with formulas, and a monthly pass to re-check statuses. For a list of fifty accounts, manual is fine. At a few hundred accounts a month it becomes a part-time job, and the re-validation cycle is the first thing that quietly stops happening.
HuntSales maintains a registry-aligned Singapore company database, so filtering by SSIC code, incorporation date, and live status is a query rather than a project, and new incorporations matching your ICP surface automatically. Enrichment then layers lawfully sourced business contact details on top of the registry baseline, with provenance recorded per contact.
Whichever route you take, the principle is the same: build from the registry outward, not from a purchased contact dump inward. Ground truth first, people second, outreach last.
Check any Singapore entity in seconds
The free HuntSales UEN lookup verifies an entity's registered name, status, and incorporation year against registry data, so dead companies come off your list before the campaign goes out.
Try the UEN lookupFrequently asked
Is it legal to use ACRA data for prospecting?
Yes. Registry information about an entity, such as its name, UEN, status, address, and SSIC activities, is company data, not personal data, so the PDPA does not restrict using it to build prospect lists. The legal care points arrive when you enrich those records with individuals' contact details, which must qualify as lawfully sourced business contact information, and when you send, where normal Singapore outreach rules apply.
What ACRA information is free?
The Bizfile directory search is free and returns an entity's registered name, UEN, entity type, status, and registered address. ACRA also publishes open corporate entity datasets through data.gov.sg. The paid Business Profile, at S$5.50 per entity, adds directors, shareholders, share capital, full SSIC activity descriptions, and filing history.
Can I get email addresses or phone numbers from ACRA?
No. The register identifies entities and their officers, not how to email them. Prospect contact details have to come from somewhere else, and the PDPA boundary sits exactly there: corporate-domain addresses tied to a person's role generally qualify as business contact information, while personal addresses and scraped numbers do not. Registry data tells you who to look for, not how to reach them.
What does a UEN actually tell me?
Entity type and, for local companies, age. A 10-character company UEN starts with the four-digit year of incorporation, such as 201912345A for a 2019 company, while sole proprietorships carry 9 characters and entity types like LLPs carry a T or S prefix with the registration year. The UEN is also the one identifier that never changes, which makes it the right deduplication key for Singapore accounts.
How reliable are SSIC codes for targeting?
Good first cut, imperfect ground truth. Codes are self-declared at registration and often go stale after pivots, and some entities carry generic or holding-company codes. Use five-digit SSIC filters such as 62011 for software developers or 70201 for management consultancies to build the long list, then verify a sample against websites or LinkedIn before campaigning.
Why do new incorporations make good outreach triggers?
Because a registration date is a timestamped statement of need. New entities need banking, accounting, insurance, premises, and software within months, and the date plus SSIC code tells you which needs and when. Referencing a recent incorporation also gives your first line a specific, verifiable reason for contact, which lifts response rates and keeps the message clearly relevant.
How often should I re-check entity status on my lists?
Validate at list build, then re-check anything older than a quarter. Companies get struck off and renamed continuously, and each dead entity on a list is a guaranteed bounce eroding your sender reputation. Suppress anything not in live status. Our Apollo versus ACRA comparison quantifies how quickly third-party database records drift from the register.
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