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

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.

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.

Here are the real figures. For most Singapore small businesses, the going rate is S$150 to S$600 a month for light to moderate transaction volumes. Across the whole market the range stretches further, roughly S$80 monthly for the smallest setups up to S$2,000 plus for books that have gone properly complicated. But most owners reading this will land in that S$150 to S$600 band. Budget against that one.

What moves your number up or down

Here's the thing most owners get wrong. the price isn't keyed to turnover. It's driven by how many transactions run through your accounts.

Take two examples. 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, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, takes many times the hours. 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. A tidy transaction takes seconds. 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. Each one needs someone to chase it down. Manually. 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, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask.
• GST returns: usually S$80 to S$200 extra per return once you're 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. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in.
• Reporting frequency: asking for monthly numbers costs more than a once-a-year close. Only pay for the cadence you'll actually open.
• Group structures: each company needs its own books and its own filings, so the second entity costs close to a full second fee.

Why payroll pricing varies so wildly

Payroll pricing confuses people, and the reason is scope. 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 expensive end includes statutory submissions, and in Singapore that means CPF. 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. As of 2026 the Ordinary Wage ceiling is S$6,800 monthly, raised from S$6,300, which changed what employers owe on higher salaries. Additional Wage is capped yearly at S$102,000 less whatever Ordinary Wage has already absorbed. 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. The CPF deadline is the 14th of the month after, 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.

Why two quotes are rarely comparable

The word "accounting" covers four distinct functions here, but just one is what you need every month. This is why a S$1,200 quote and a S$250 quote can both be honest.

The recurring monthly piece is bookkeeping, covering reconciling your bank feed, tracking what you owe and what's owed to you, running payroll and CPF, and preparing SFRS financial statements. That's the fee we've been discussing. That part alone.

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, 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. The company must be private for the whole financial year too, and ordinarily you'd meet the tests in the two prior years, though a company less than two years old is judged on the current year alone.

This is a bigger deal than it sounds. 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

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 accountant fees for small business 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. And there's a risk that rarely appears in the comparison: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. A firm has cover. One person is a single point of failure.

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. 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.

Check these three things. First, does the fee include year-end financial statements, or just monthly bookkeeping? Many low quotes cover reconciliation and charge again for the year-end. Second, what's the rule when transactions increase? 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. The difference shows up fast.

Get the answers 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. Your average monthly transaction count, your headcount, and whether you're GST-registered. That's enough for a firm to give you a fixed figure quickly. 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. 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, 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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