Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

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Accounting Fees in Singapore: What SMEs Really Pay

What does a Singapore accountant cost? Most SMEs pay S$150 to S$600 monthly. See what sets the price, what isn't included, and when hiring in-house wins.

Try asking a Singapore accounting firm for a number and watch the subject change. The standard reply is a request for a consultation, not a figure. That's frustrating when you're just trying to build a budget.

Here are the real figures. For the average Pte Ltd or sole proprietorship, the going rate is 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. The vast majority of small businesses sit in the narrower range. That's the number to plan around.

Why quotes differ so much

Here's the thing most owners get wrong. Your fee isn't set by revenue. It's set by transaction volume.

Consider two businesses. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve invoices has almost nothing to reconcile. An e-commerce store doing S$200,000 across 900 small orders, complete with gateway fees, returns and disputes, is far more work. Revenue tells you nothing here. A quote based purely on revenue is a placeholder, not a price. Make them count the lines.

The reason volume dominates is mechanical. Every transaction has to be recorded, categorised, and matched against your bank feed. A tidy transaction takes seconds. The cost sits in the exceptions, and they look like this. A payment that doesn't tie to an invoice, a duplicate charge, a refund processed weeks after the sale, a supplier who changed their billing name. Those need a human to investigate. Manually. 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: billed per head monthly, with enormous variation between firms, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask.
• 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. 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. Only pay for the cadence you'll actually open.
• Multiple entities: 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 usually describing different jobs. Scope explains the gap.

The cheap end is usually salary computation and a payslip. The expensive end includes statutory submissions, and in Singapore bookkeeping prices that means CPF. For staff below 55, the employer contributes 17 percent, and the employee adds 20 percent. Rates step down with age. 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. 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. 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. 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. CPF submissions are due by the 14th of the following month, with 1.5 percent monthly interest on anything overdue.

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.

The four jobs hiding under one word

In Singapore, "accounting" gets used to describe four separate regulated jobs, but just one is what you need every month. It explains how one firm quotes S$1,200 and another S$250 without either being dishonest.

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 number in the range above. 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 only becomes your problem after taxable turnover passes 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.

Most small companies never need that audit. 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 ordinarily you'd meet the tests in the two prior years, though newly incorporated companies under two years old are assessed on the current year.

That exemption matters more than most owners realise. An audit is a separate professional engagement with its own fee, frequently in the thousands, so knowing whether you're exempt changes your annual budget significantly. Check which side you're on.

Is a full-time hire cheaper

The math here is one-sided for smaller firms. Hiring in-house runs somewhere between S$62,000 and S$87,000 annually once you add employer CPF, annual leave, and software. Compare that to roughly S$7,200 a year at the upper end of the outsourced range.

Salary is the headline, not the total. Employer CPF adds 17 percent for staff below 55, then annual leave, medical coverage, a desk, and the accounting software licence. And there's a risk that rarely appears in the comparison: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. An outsourced provider has continuity built in. That's a real risk.

For most small businesses, outsourcing wins comfortably. The tipping point arrives further out than most expect, 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 a different situation from simply having grown.

What a suspiciously cheap price usually means

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

Ask these before signing. 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? 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.

How to get a real number

Give any firm these three things and they can quote you properly, no consultation needed. monthly transaction volume, number of employees, and your GST registration status. 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. Include gateway payments if you're selling online. Avoid picking your busiest month or your quietest, since an atypical month produces a quote that changes on you. Pick a boring month.

Get the fee confirmed in writing before you sign, including what happens if your volume grows. A fixed monthly figure agreed upfront beats an hourly rate you can't forecast. That's the whole game with accounting fees: predictability, not the lowest number on the page.

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