Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

What Small Business Accounting Costs You in Singapore 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. Getting a straight price out of a Singapore accounting firm is weirdly hard. Everyone wants a call before they'll say a number. 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, the going rate is S$150 to S$600 a month if you're under 300 transactions monthly. Across the whole market the range stretches further, 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 actually drives the price The common mistake is assuming the wrong variable. 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 takes very little work. A Shopify shop doing S$200,000 through 900 tiny transactions, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, costs considerably more to handle. The smaller business pays more. A quote based purely on revenue is a placeholder, not a price. Make them count the lines. It's worth understanding why volume matters so much. 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. Those need a human to investigate. Manually. A business with 900 transactions doesn't just have thirty times the data of one with 30, and exceptions are where the hours go. Beyond volume, a few things push the number up: Payroll processing: 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. Quarterly GST: 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. It's a one-off project fee, not a monthly rate. Accounting software: 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: 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 often not describing the same work. Different scope entirely. The cheap end is usually salary computation and a payslip. The higher price includes the statutory filings, and CPF is the bulk of it. For staff below 55, the employer contributes 17 percent, 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. Ceilings complicate it further. 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. 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. What your quote probably doesn't cover The word "accounting" covers four distinct functions here, 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. The recurring monthly piece is bookkeeping, 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 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. 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. 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 your exemption status materially changes what you'll spend each year. Find out where you sit. In-house or outsourced This one's less close than people expect. Hiring in-house runs S$62,000 to S$87,000 a year 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. There's also the risk nobody prices in: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. An get more info outsourced provider has continuity built in. That's a real risk. 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. Before that, you're funding idle capacity. The honest exception is complexity, not size. A business with inventory across multiple warehouses, foreign currency exposure, and daily management decisions that depend on live numbers benefits from someone in the building. That's not the same as just getting bigger. Red flags worth checking 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 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 happens when your volume grows? An unannounced jump at a volume threshold isn't a fixed fee. 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. It matters more than you'd think. Put all of it in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. If they stall, that's your answer. How to get a real number Skip the discovery call theatre and hand over three things. Your average monthly transaction count, your headcount, and whether you're GST-registered. Any competent provider can price that in a day. If they still won't commit to a number, that tells you something. Counting your transaction volume takes ten minutes. Open your business copyright for a normal month and count the lines. 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. 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. Predictability is what you're actually buying, not the smallest figure you can find.