Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

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. 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. Let's skip to what things actually cost. For a typical SME here, monthly accounting and bookkeeping runs 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. 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 has almost nothing to reconcile. An e-commerce store doing S$200,000 across 900 small orders, 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. Volume, not revenue. It's worth understanding why volume matters so much. Every transaction has to be recorded, categorised, and matched against your bank feed. 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. an unmatched payment, a duplicated charge, a late refund, a vendor who renamed their entity. Those need a human to investigate. 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. Some other factors move the price too: Payroll: charged per employee per month, and the spread between providers is huge, anywhere from single digits to S$30 or S$80 per person. GST returns: usually S$80 to S$200 extra per return 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. Accounting software: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in. How often you want reports: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them. Multiple entities: 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. Same word, different job. At the low end you're getting a calculation and a payslip. The expensive end includes statutory submissions, 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 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. Bonus payments hit the Additional Wage cap, and that's the common failure point. Check that one twice. Then there's the Skills Development Levy, charged at 0.25 percent of gross wages with a monthly cap in the S$10 to S$17 range. The CPF deadline is the 14th of the month after, with 1.5 percent monthly interest on anything overdue. Before comparing payroll prices, establish scope. Paying more for correct statutory submissions can bookkeeping fee beat paying less and doing the filings yourself. The four jobs hiding under one word The word "accounting" covers four distinct functions here, and only one of them is the monthly work. This is why a S$1,200 quote and a S$250 quote can both be honest. 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. 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. 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. 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. That exemption matters more than most owners realise. 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 The math here is one-sided for smaller firms. Hiring in-house runs S$62,000 to S$87,000 a year once you add employer CPF, annual leave, and software. Compare that to roughly S$7,200 a year at the upper end of the outsourced range. 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: when a single in-house accountant leaves, the function stops with them. A firm has cover. Nobody prices that in. 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. 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 A very low quote isn't automatically a bad deal, but it's worth interrogating. 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? 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. That's an opening rate. Third, who's doing the work? Find out whether there's a named accountant or a shared inbox. It matters more than you'd think. Get the answers in writing. A provider confident in their pricing will commit to it. If they stall, that's your answer. What to ask for Give any firm these three things and they can quote you properly, no consultation needed. 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. A firm that still won't quote is telling you something. Counting your transactions is easier than it sounds. Open your business copyright for a normal month and count the lines. Add 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. Average is what you want. 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.