Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Accounting Fees in Singapore: What SMEs Really Pay 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. Most Singapore accounting quotes arrive as "it depends," which helps nobody. The standard reply is a request for a consultation, not a figure. Which is useless if you're only trying to forecast next year's costs. Here are the real figures. 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. That's the number to plan around. What actually drives the price This is where most people misjudge it. Your fee isn't set by revenue. It's set by transaction volume. Take two examples. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve invoices takes very little work. 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. Ask them to count instead. It's worth understanding why volume matters so much. 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. Each one needs someone to chase it down. One at a time. Scale the transactions and you scale the exceptions with them, it has thirty times the opportunities for something to go wrong. A handful of extras change the total: Payroll processing: billed per head monthly, with enormous variation between firms, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask. Quarterly GST: usually S$80 to S$200 extra per return once you're registered. Backlog reconstruction: 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. Accounting software: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in. Reporting frequency: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them. Multiple entities: every entity carries a separate set of accounts, so two companies rarely cost the same as one and a half. What payroll really adds to the bill Payroll pricing confuses people, and the reason is scope. Quotes range from single digits to S$80 per employee. They're usually describing different jobs. Different scope entirely. At the low end you're getting a calculation 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. Getting the age band wrong on a single employee means a correction and a resubmission. Ceilings complicate it further. 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. Bonus payments hit the Additional Wage cap, and that's the common failure point. Easy to get wrong. Then there's the Skills Development Levy, 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, and late payment attracts interest at 1.5 percent per month. Before comparing payroll prices, establish scope. Paying more for correct statutory submissions can beat paying less and doing the filings yourself. Why two quotes are rarely comparable The word "accounting" covers four distinct functions here, 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. 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 number in the range above. Just that. Three more get billed apart. 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. Plenty of SMEs are exempt from audit entirely. Exemption applies when you satisfy two of three criteria, 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. 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 a company less than two years old is judged on the current year alone. That exemption matters more than most owners realise. 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. Check which side you're on. Outsourcing versus hiring someone 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 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. The salary itself is only part of it. Add 17 percent employer CPF for anyone under 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. Nobody prices that in. For most small businesses, outsourcing wins comfortably. The crossover comes later than owners assume, generally once volume and reporting needs fill a full-time role. Until then, you're paying a salary for capacity you aren't using. Where in-house wins is complexity. Multi-warehouse inventory, multi-currency exposure, and decisions that copyright on same-day figures justifies someone on site. That's not the same as just getting bigger. Red flags worth checking Cheap isn't automatically bad, though it deserves questions. 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, are year-end statements included or is this monthly work only? Plenty of cheap quotes stop at the monthly reconciliation and bill separately for the annual close. Second, what's the rule when transactions increase? A fee that jumps without warning at 40 transactions isn't fixed. That's an opening rate. Third, who actually does the work? Find out whether there's a named accountant or a shared inbox. The difference shows up fast. Get the answers in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. If they stall, that's your answer. What to ask for 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. 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 how much does a good accountant cost your payment gateway transactions if you sell 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, including what happens if your volume grows. 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.