Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

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How Much Do Accounting Services Cost in Singapore?

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. Which is useless if you're only trying to forecast next year's costs.

Let's skip to what things actually cost. For most Singapore small businesses, the going rate is S$150 to S$600 a month at up to 300 transactions a month. The full market spread is wider, roughly S$80 monthly for the smallest setups up to S$2,000 plus for books that have gone properly complicated. 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 driven by how many transactions run through your accounts.

Consider two businesses. 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, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, is far more work. The smaller business pays more. 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. 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. Manually. A business with 900 transactions doesn't just have thirty times the data of one with 30, it has thirty times the opportunities for something to go wrong.

Beyond volume, a few things push the number up:

• Staff payroll: billed per head monthly, and the spread between providers is huge, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask.
• GST filing: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing once you're registered.
• Clean-up: if your books are a year behind, someone has to rebuild them. Expect a separate one-time charge, which is fair, but get it quoted on its own.
• Xero and copyright subscriptions: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Confirm the subscription is included.
• Reporting frequency: 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 two companies rarely cost the same as one and a half.

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 usually describing different jobs. Same word, different job.

The cheap end is usually salary computation and a payslip. The expensive end includes statutory submissions, 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. The Ordinary Wage ceiling sits at S$6,800 a month in 2026, up from S$6,300, which changed what employers owe on higher salaries. 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. 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. The CPF deadline is the 14th of the month after, and late payment attracts interest at 1.5 percent per month.

So when you compare payroll quotes, ask what's included. Paying more for correct statutory submissions can beat paying less and doing the filings yourself.

Why two quotes are rarely comparable

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.

The recurring monthly piece is bookkeeping, covering reconciling your bank feed, tracking what you website owe and what's owed to you, running payroll and CPF, and preparing SFRS financial statements. That's the number in the range above. Nothing else.

The other three are separate engagements. 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. And statutory audit can only be signed off by an ACRA-registered public accountant.

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. S$10 million or less in revenue, S$10 million or less in total assets, or no more than 50 staff. You also need to be a private company throughout the financial year, 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.

That exemption matters more than most owners realise. Audit is a distinct engagement carrying its own cost, often several thousand dollars, so knowing whether you're exempt changes your annual budget significantly. Find out where you sit.

Is a full-time hire cheaper

This one's less close than people expect. A full-time accountant in Singapore costs S$62,000 to S$87,000 a year after employer CPF contributions, leave, and the subscriptions. 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 leave entitlement, medical benefits, workspace, and software. There's also the risk nobody prices in: when a single in-house accountant leaves, the function stops with them. A firm has cover. That's a real risk.

Outsourcing is cheaper for the majority of SMEs. 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.

Warning signs in a quote

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.

Ask these before signing. 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's the rule when transactions increase? An unannounced jump at a volume threshold isn't a fixed fee. 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.

Get the answers in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. Hesitation tells you plenty.

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. 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. Include gateway payments if you're selling online. Avoid picking your busiest month or your quietest, 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 fee you can budget around is worth more than a cheap hourly rate that drifts. That's the whole game with accounting fees: predictability, not the lowest number on the page.

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