Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Blog Article
How Much Do Accounting Services Cost in Singapore?
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. Everyone wants a call before they'll say a number. 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. The vast majority of small businesses sit in the narrower range. Plan on it.
What actually drives the price
Here's the thing most owners get wrong. Your fee isn't set by revenue. It's set by transaction volume.
Picture two companies. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve invoices has almost nothing to reconcile. A Shopify shop doing S$200,000 through 900 tiny transactions, complete with gateway fees, returns and disputes, takes many times the hours. The one with less revenue pays the bigger fee. A quote based purely on revenue is a placeholder, not a price. Make them count the lines.
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 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 charge, a refund processed weeks after the sale, a supplier who changed their billing name. Those need a human to investigate. Manually. A business how much do accounting services cost in singapore with 900 transactions doesn't just have thirty times the data of one with 30, and exceptions are where the hours go.
Some other factors move the price too:
- Payroll processing: charged per employee per month, with enormous variation between firms, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask.
- GST filing: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing if your business is GST-registered.
- Backlog reconstruction: if your books are a year behind, someone has to rebuild them. It's a one-off project fee, not a monthly rate.
- Accounting software: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Confirm the subscription is included.
- Reporting frequency: asking for monthly numbers costs more than a once-a-year close. Only pay for the cadence you'll actually open.
- 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 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. Same word, different job.
At the low end you're getting a calculation and a payslip. The higher price includes the statutory filings, and in Singapore 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. Getting the age band wrong on a single employee means a correction and a resubmission.
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. Bonuses fall under that second ceiling, which is where most calculation errors happen. Easy to get wrong.
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.
The four jobs hiding under one word
In Singapore, "accounting" gets used to describe four separate regulated jobs, and only one of them is the monthly work. 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 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 only becomes your problem after taxable turnover passes S$1 million, which is the point IRAS registration becomes compulsory. Statutory audit requires an ACRA-registered public accountant to sign.
Most small companies never need that audit. You qualify for the small company exemption if you meet two of three tests, 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 newly incorporated companies under two years old are assessed on the current year.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds. Audit is a distinct engagement carrying its own cost, often several thousand dollars, so your exemption status materially changes what you'll spend each year. Find out where you sit.
Is a full-time hire cheaper
This one's less close than people expect. Hiring in-house runs S$62,000 to S$87,000 a year 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 leave entitlement, medical benefits, workspace, and software. 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, 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.
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.
Red flags worth checking
Cheap isn't automatically bad, though it deserves questions. A well-run fixed-fee practice can price below the market through efficiency alone. 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 actually does the work? Ask whether you get a named contact who knows your business or a rotating queue. The difference shows up fast.
Put all of it in writing. A provider confident in their pricing will commit to it. If they stall, that's your answer.
Getting an actual quote
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. A firm that still won't quote is telling you something.
Counting your transaction volume takes ten minutes. 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. Pick a boring month.
Get the fee confirmed in writing before you sign, with a stated rule for what happens when volume increases. 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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