Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Blog Article
Accounting Fees Singapore: A Straight Answer on Price
Real Singapore accounting fees: S$150 to S$600 a month for most small firms. Learn what moves your quote, what's billed separately, and how to compare.
Try asking a Singapore accounting firm for a number and watch the subject change. You'll hear "it depends on your requirements" and get pushed toward a discovery call. Which is useless if you're only trying to forecast next year's costs.
Here are the real figures. For the average Pte Ltd or sole proprietorship, monthly accounting and bookkeeping runs S$150 to S$600 a month at up to 300 transactions a month. The full market spread is wider, from about S$80 a month at the very light end to S$2,000 or more for complex operations. But most owners reading this will land in that S$150 to S$600 band. That's the number to plan around.
What moves your number up or down
Here's the thing most owners get wrong. the price isn't keyed to turnover. It's set by transaction volume.
Take two examples. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve invoices costs almost nothing to service. A Shopify shop doing S$200,000 through 900 tiny transactions, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, costs considerably more to handle. The one with less revenue pays the bigger fee. Any firm quoting you off turnover alone hasn't looked at your books. Make them count the lines.
It's worth understanding why volume matters so much. Every transaction has to be recorded, categorised, and matched against your bank feed. Most of that is fast when the data is clean. The expense lives in the ones that don't match, and they look like this. A payment that doesn't tie to an invoice, a duplicate small business accountant rates charge, a refund processed weeks after the sale, a supplier who changed their billing name. Each one needs someone to chase it down. One at a time. Scale the transactions and you scale the exceptions with them, and exceptions are where the hours go.
A handful of extras change the total:
- Payroll: charged per employee per month, and the spread between providers is huge, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask.
- GST returns: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing once you're registered.
- Clean-up: when nobody's touched the accounts since incorporation, that's reconstruction. It's a one-off project fee, not a monthly rate.
- Software licences: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in.
- How often you want reports: asking for monthly numbers costs more than a once-a-year close. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them.
- Group structures: every entity carries a separate set of accounts, so two companies rarely cost the same as one and a half.
Understanding the payroll line
Payroll pricing confuses people, and the reason is scope. One firm says S$8 a head, another says S$80. They're often not describing the same work. Scope explains the gap.
At the low end you're getting a calculation and a payslip. The expensive end includes statutory submissions, and in Singapore that means CPF. For staff below 55, the employer contributes 17 percent, and the employee adds 20 percent. The rates taper as employees get older. 13 percent employer for ages 55 to 60, 9 percent for 60 to 65, 7.5 percent for 65 to 70, and 5 percent above 70. One misclassified employee means an amended filing.
There's also a wage ceiling to track. As of 2026 the Ordinary Wage ceiling is S$6,800 monthly, raised from S$6,300, which shifted the numbers for better-paid staff. The Additional Wage ceiling works annually, at S$102,000 minus the Ordinary Wage contributions already made that year. Bonus payments hit the Additional Wage cap, and that's the common failure point. Check that one twice.
SDL sits on top of that, at 0.25 percent of gross wages, capped between roughly S$10 and S$17 per employee monthly. CPF submissions are due by the 14th of the following month, with 1.5 percent monthly interest on anything overdue.
So when you compare payroll quotes, ask what's included. A firm charging more but handling CPF and SDL submissions correctly may be cheaper than one that computes payslips and leaves the filings to you.
Why two quotes are rarely comparable
In Singapore, "accounting" gets used to describe four separate regulated jobs, and only one of them is the monthly work. This is why a S$1,200 quote and a S$250 quote can both be honest.
The recurring monthly piece is bookkeeping, covering reconciling your bank feed, tracking what you owe and what's owed to you, running payroll and CPF, and preparing SFRS financial statements. That's the fee we've been discussing. Nothing else.
Three more get billed apart. Corporate tax work is handled by a tax agent, not your bookkeeper. GST filing only matters once your taxable turnover crosses S$1 million, which is the point IRAS registration becomes compulsory. And statutory audit can only be signed off by an ACRA-registered public accountant.
Plenty of SMEs are exempt from audit entirely. Exemption applies when you satisfy two of three criteria, and here they are. revenue at or under S$10 million, total assets at or under S$10 million, or 50 or fewer employees. The company must be private for the whole financial year too, and normally you need to have met the criteria across the two preceding financial years, though a company less than two years old is judged on the current year alone.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds. Audit is a distinct engagement carrying its own cost, frequently in the thousands, so your exemption status materially changes what you'll spend each year. Find out where you sit.
Outsourcing versus hiring someone
This one's less close than people expect. Hiring in-house runs somewhere between S$62,000 and S$87,000 annually after employer CPF contributions, leave, and the subscriptions. Set that against S$600 a month, or S$7,200 a year, at the top of the outsourced SME band.
Salary is the headline, not the total. Add 17 percent employer CPF for anyone under 55, then leave entitlement, medical benefits, workspace, and software. And there's a risk that rarely appears in the comparison: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. A firm has cover. One person is a single point of failure.
Outsourcing is cheaper for the majority of SMEs. The tipping point arrives further out than most expect, usually when transaction volume, headcount and reporting demands justify a dedicated person. Until then, you're paying a salary for capacity you aren't using.
The honest exception is complexity, not size. Multi-warehouse inventory, multi-currency exposure, and decisions that copyright on same-day figures benefits from someone in the building. That's a different situation from simply having grown.
Red flags worth checking
Cheap isn't automatically bad, though it deserves questions. A lean fixed-fee provider can undercut the market by working efficiently on modern software. The concern is a price that's low because something's been left out.
Check these three things. First, are year-end statements included or is this monthly work only? Many low quotes cover reconciliation and charge again for the year-end. Second, what's the rule when transactions increase? A fee that jumps without warning at 40 transactions isn't fixed. That's an opening rate. Third, who's doing the work? Find out whether there's a named accountant or a shared inbox. It matters more than you'd think.
Put all of it in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. Hesitation tells you plenty.
Getting an actual quote
Skip the discovery call theatre and hand over three things. Your average monthly transaction count, your headcount, and whether you're GST-registered. That's enough for a firm to give you a fixed figure quickly. If they still won't commit to a number, that tells you something.
Counting your transactions is easier than it sounds. Pull one typical month of bank statements and count the entries. Include gateway payments if you're selling online. Don't use your peak month or your slowest, because a quote built on an unrepresentative month will get revised later. Average is what you want.
Get the fee confirmed in writing before you sign, with a stated rule for what happens when volume increases. A fixed monthly fee you can budget around is worth more than a cheap hourly rate that drifts. That's the whole game with accounting fees: predictability, not the lowest number on the page.
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