Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

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Singapore Accounting Fees: The Numbers Nobody Posts

Real Singapore accounting fees: S$150 to S$600 a month for most small firms. Learn what moves your quote, what's billed separately, accounting price list 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. That's frustrating when you're just trying to build a budget.

Let's skip to what things actually cost. For most Singapore small businesses, monthly accounting and bookkeeping runs S$150 to S$600 a month for light to moderate transaction volumes. 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. The vast majority of small businesses sit in the narrower range. Budget against that one.

What moves your number up or down

This is where most people misjudge it. Your fee isn't set by revenue. It's set by transaction volume.

Consider two businesses. An agency turning over S$800,000 on twelve annual invoices takes very little work. An e-commerce store doing S$200,000 across 900 small orders, complete with gateway fees, returns and disputes, costs considerably more to handle. Revenue tells you nothing here. Any firm quoting you off turnover alone hasn't looked at your books. Ask them to count instead.

The reason volume dominates is mechanical. Each line needs recording, categorising, and reconciling to the copyright. Most of that is fast when the data is clean. The cost sits in the exceptions, 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. By hand. Scale the transactions and you scale the exceptions with them, it has thirty times the opportunities for something to go wrong.

Beyond volume, a few things push the number up:

• Staff payroll: charged per employee per month, with enormous variation between firms, anywhere from single digits to S$30 or S$80 per person.
• GST returns: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing if your business is GST-registered.
• Clean-up: when nobody's touched the accounts since incorporation, that's reconstruction. Expect a separate one-time charge, which is fair, but get it quoted on its own.
• Software licences: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in.
• How often you want reports: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. 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.

At the low end you're getting a calculation and a payslip. The expensive end includes statutory submissions, and CPF is the bulk of it. 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. One misclassified employee means an amended filing.

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 changed what employers owe on higher salaries. The Additional Wage ceiling works annually, at S$102,000 minus the Ordinary Wage contributions already made that year. Bonuses fall under that second ceiling, which is where most calculation errors happen. Check that one twice.

Then there's the Skills Development Levy, charged at 0.25 percent of gross wages with a monthly cap in the S$10 to S$17 range. CPF submissions are due by the 14th of the following month, and late payment attracts interest at 1.5 percent per month.

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.

Monthly bookkeeping is the first, covering bank reconciliation, accounts payable and receivable, payroll with CPF submissions, and SFRS-compliant year-end statements. That's the fee we've been discussing. That part alone.

The other three are separate engagements. Corporate tax filing, meaning your ECI and Form C-S, goes to a registered tax agent. GST filing only matters once your taxable turnover crosses S$1 million, the threshold that triggers mandatory IRAS registration. Statutory audit requires an ACRA-registered public accountant to sign.

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 normally you need to have met the criteria across the two preceding financial years, though newly incorporated companies under two years old are assessed on the current year.

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.

Is a full-time hire cheaper

This one's less close than people expect. A full-time accountant in Singapore costs somewhere between S$62,000 and S$87,000 annually once you add employer CPF, annual leave, and software. 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 annual leave, medical coverage, a desk, and the accounting software licence. There's also the risk nobody prices in: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. A firm has cover. Nobody prices that in.

Outsourcing is cheaper for the majority of SMEs. The crossover comes later than owners assume, generally once volume and reporting needs fill a full-time role. Before that, you're funding idle capacity.

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 not the same as just getting bigger.

What a suspiciously cheap price usually means

A very low quote isn't automatically a bad deal, but it's worth interrogating. 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.

Check these three things. First, does the fee include year-end financial statements, or just monthly bookkeeping? Plenty of cheap quotes stop at the monthly reconciliation and bill separately for the annual close. Second, what happens when your volume grows? A fee that jumps without warning at 40 transactions isn't fixed. That's an opening rate. Third, who's doing the work? Ask whether you get a named contact who knows your business or a rotating queue. It matters more than you'd think.

Get the answers in writing. A provider confident in their pricing will commit to it. Hesitation tells you plenty.

What to ask for

Give any firm these three things and they can quote you properly, no consultation needed. Your average monthly transaction count, your headcount, and whether you're GST-registered. Any competent provider can price that in a day. A firm that still won't quote is telling you something.

Counting your transactions is easier than it sounds. Pull one typical month of bank statements and count the entries. Add your payment gateway transactions if you sell online. Don't use your peak month or your slowest, since an atypical month produces a quote that changes on you. Average is what you want.

Insist on a written fixed fee up front, including what happens if your volume grows. 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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