GoBusiness Licensing Portal

The GoBusiness Licensing portal is a pro-enterprise digitalisation effort to enable a simpler, faster and better process for businesses to apply for licenses, permits and certificates from the government. The initiative aims to help business owners save time and reduce compliance cost so that they can focus on their core business.

Benefits

A key feature of the portal is the Guided Journey, which is a step-by-step guide that helps a business navigate the licensing landscape to determine the licences required, and the order to apply for them. The Guided Journey feature is currently available for licence application in the food service sector, making it much easier for business owners to set up F&B establishments.

Also, business owners would previously have to fill up to 845 data fields across 14 forms administered by different government agencies. With the new portal, they will now only need to fill in one application form with no more than 90 data fields.

The GoBusiness Licensing portal was officially launched on 31 Oct 2019 and was jointly developed by the Ministry of Trade & Industry (MTI), Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO) and GovTech. It is the result of a deep dive into the regulatory requirements for the food services sector, which reviewed how to streamline regulations, and simplify and automate processes from the businesses’ perspective.

What’s Next?

The retail sector has been identified as the next sector to be covered by the GoBusiness portal. There are also plans to streamline other types of transactions between businesses and the government, such as grant applications, so that businesses can experience seamless and convenient service from the government throughout the business life cycle. The Guided Journey feature will also be extended to these other sectors or types of business transactions with the government.