For a long stretch of running an F&B venue in Singapore, the back office was a quiet drag on every other part of the business. Not the cooking. Not the service. Not the staff. The paperwork.
Receipts arrived in WhatsApp groups. Three different POS systems, one per outlet, each exporting in a slightly different format. Bank reconciliations that ran two weeks late because the person doing them was also running payroll, and also chasing suppliers, and also covering shifts. A monthly management report that arrived on the 22nd of the following month — useful only as a historical artefact by the time it landed.
We tried a few accounting firms. They could do the compliance — file the ACRA annual return, submit the GST F5, get Form C-S in by November. That part was fine. What we couldn't find was someone who understood the operational reality behind the compliance: the high transaction volume, the cash movement across till and card and delivery platform, the moments where revenue looked fine but margin had quietly slipped, the managers spending half their week chasing receipts.
The three things that were missing
When we sat down with the accountant and the business process manager who eventually became co-founders, we found we were all saying versions of the same thing.
The accountant had spent years inside firms that were excellent at compliance and indifferent about whether the books were actually useful to the owner. Get the numbers right, file on time, move on to the next client.
The process manager had spent years designing workflows for high-volume operations and watching well-meaning bookkeeping break under the load. Software wasn't the problem. Workflow design was. The chart of accounts wasn't built for the way the business ran. The receipt-capture habit wasn't there. The exception-detection layer didn't exist.
The F&B side had the operator's view: I don't want a great accountant. I want a back office that runs.
What we built
Acuitas is the firm we couldn't find. It does the compliance — properly, on a calendar we own, not paperwork operators have to chase. That part is the floor.
The actual product is what sits around the compliance: Xero designed for how your business runs, Aspire wired in for expenditure and approvals, dashboards that show owners what the consolidated P&L hides, named AI agents doing the repetitive admin under human review. The whole information flow, from the moment a sale happens in a venue to the moment an owner sees it in their morning summary — designed as one system, not seven disconnected tools.
The thing we cared about most was the discipline at the seam between AI and accounting. AI agents are good at drafting classification, chasing missing invoices, flagging exceptions, and writing weekly summaries. They are not accountants. We've built the firm so that every entry that posts to a client's ledger has been touched by two humans after the agent drafts it — a process manager and a qualified accountant. Nothing posts without sign-off. That is the only honest way to run AI on accounting data, and it is the only way we'd hand our own businesses over to a firm.
Who this is for
F&B operators. Retail businesses. SMEs scaling into a place where spreadsheets stop working. People who have to actually run the thing — not analyse it from outside.
If you're running a venue in Singapore and you can't answer “is this outlet profitable this month” in under an hour, you're the operator we built this for.
If you want to see how we think before you talk to us, the demo dashboard and the stack teardown are the most honest read of what working with us looks like.
— The Acuitas team