Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

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What Small Business Accounting Costs You in Singapore

Singapore accounting fees run S$150 to S$600 a month for most SMEs. Here's what drives your quote, what's excluded, and how outsourcing compares to hiring.

Try asking a Singapore accounting firm for a number and watch the subject change. Everyone wants a call before they'll say a number. Not helpful when you're doing a simple cash flow projection.

Here are the real figures. For a typical SME here, expect to pay S$150 to S$600 a month if you're under 300 transactions monthly. 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. Budget against that one.

Why quotes differ so much

This is where most people misjudge it. the price isn't keyed to turnover. It's driven by how many transactions run through your accounts.

Consider two businesses. An agency turning over S$800,000 on twelve annual invoices has almost nothing to reconcile. An e-commerce store doing S$200,000 across 900 small orders, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, costs considerably more to handle. Revenue tells you nothing here. A quote based purely on revenue is a placeholder, not a price. Volume, not revenue.

It's worth understanding why volume matters so much. Each line needs recording, categorising, and reconciling to the copyright. A tidy transaction takes seconds. The expense lives in the ones that don't match, and they look like this. an unmatched payment, a duplicated charge, a late refund, a vendor who renamed their entity. Each one needs someone to chase it down. One at a time. A business with 900 transactions doesn't just have thirty times the data of one with 30, it has thirty times the opportunities for something to go wrong.

Some other factors move the price too:

• Payroll processing: billed per head monthly, with enormous variation between firms, anywhere from single digits to S$30 or S$80 per person.
• Quarterly GST: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing if your business is GST-registered.
• Catch-up work: when nobody's touched the accounts since incorporation, that's reconstruction. It's a one-off project fee, not a monthly rate.
• Accounting software: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. 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.
• More than one company: each company needs its own books and its own filings, so the second entity costs close to a full second fee.

Understanding the payroll line

Payroll deserves its own explanation because the quotes look irrational. Quotes range from single digits to S$80 per employee. They're usually describing different jobs. Scope explains the gap.

The cheap end is usually salary computation and a payslip. The higher price includes the statutory filings, and in Singapore that means CPF. Employer CPF contributions run 17 percent of wages for employees under 55, with the employee contributing 20 percent on top. The rates taper as employees get older. 13 percent for 55 to 60, then 9 percent, 7.5 percent, and 5 percent for the older bands. Getting the age band wrong on a single employee means a correction and a resubmission.

There's also a wage ceiling to track. The Ordinary Wage ceiling sits at S$6,800 a month in 2026, up from S$6,300, which shifted the numbers for better-paid staff. Additional Wage is capped yearly at S$102,000 less whatever Ordinary Wage has already absorbed. Bonuses fall under that second ceiling, which is where most calculation errors happen. Worth double-checking.

SDL sits on top of that, at 0.25 percent of gross wages, capped between roughly S$10 and S$17 per employee monthly. The CPF deadline is the 14th of the month after, and late payment attracts interest at 1.5 percent per month.

Before comparing payroll prices, establish scope. 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.

What your quote probably doesn't cover

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, the threshold that triggers mandatory IRAS registration. And statutory audit can only be signed off by an ACRA-registered public accountant.

Plenty of SMEs are exempt from audit entirely. You qualify for the small company exemption if you meet two of three tests, and here they are. S$10 million or less in revenue, S$10 million or less in total assets, or no more than 50 staff. You also need to be a private company throughout the financial year, and ordinarily you'd meet the tests in the two prior years, though a company less than two years old is judged on the current year alone.

This is a bigger deal than it sounds. An audit is a separate professional engagement with its own fee, often several thousand dollars, so knowing whether you're exempt changes your annual budget significantly. Find out where you sit.

Outsourcing versus hiring someone

The math bookkeeping costs per month here is one-sided for smaller firms. A full-time accountant in Singapore costs 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. Employer CPF adds 17 percent for staff below 55, then leave entitlement, medical benefits, workspace, and software. There's also the risk nobody prices in: when a single in-house accountant leaves, the function stops with them. An outsourced provider has continuity built in. Nobody prices that in.

Outsourcing is cheaper for the majority of SMEs. The crossover comes later than owners assume, usually when transaction volume, headcount and reporting demands justify a dedicated person. Before that, you're funding idle capacity.

Where in-house wins is complexity. A business with inventory across multiple warehouses, foreign currency exposure, and daily management decisions that depend on live numbers justifies someone on site. That's a different situation from simply having grown.

What a suspiciously cheap price usually means

Cheap isn't automatically bad, though it deserves questions. A well-run fixed-fee practice can price below the market through efficiency alone. The problem is when the low price reflects missing scope rather than better process.

Ask these before signing. 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. It's a starting price. Third, who actually does the work? Ask whether you get a named contact who knows your business or a rotating queue. The difference shows up fast.

Get the answers in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. Hesitation tells you plenty.

How to get a real number

Skip the discovery call theatre and hand over three things. monthly transaction volume, number of employees, and your GST registration status. Any competent provider can price that in a day. If they still won't commit to a number, that tells you something.

Counting your transactions is easier than it sounds. Open your business copyright for a normal month and count the lines. Add your payment gateway transactions if you sell online. Avoid picking your busiest month or your quietest, since an atypical month produces a quote that changes on you. 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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