Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Blog Article
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. The standard reply is a request for a consultation, not a figure. That's frustrating when you're just trying to build a budget.
Let's skip to what things actually cost. For the average Pte Ltd or sole proprietorship, 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. Budget against that one.
What actually drives the price
Here's the thing most owners get wrong. it's not about how much money you make. 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 has almost nothing to reconcile. A Shopify shop doing S$200,000 through 900 tiny transactions, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, takes many times the hours. The smaller business pays more. Any firm quoting you off turnover alone hasn't looked at your books. Make them count the lines.
It's worth understanding why volume matters so much. 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. 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, 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 returns: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing if your business is GST-registered.
- Clean-up: if your books are a year behind, someone has to rebuild them. It's a one-off project fee, not a monthly rate.
- Xero and copyright subscriptions: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. Confirm the subscription is included.
- Management reporting: 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.
Understanding the payroll line
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. Same word, different job.
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 employer for ages 55 to 60, 9 percent for 60 to 65, 7.5 percent for 65 to 70, and 5 percent above 70. Getting the age band wrong on a single employee means a correction and a resubmission.
There's also a wage ceiling to track. 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. The Additional Wage ceiling works annually, at S$102,000 minus the Ordinary Wage contributions already made that year. Bonuses fall under that second ceiling, which is where most calculation errors happen. 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. 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 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. This is why a S$1,200 quote and a S$250 quote can both be honest.
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 work is handled by a tax agent, not your bookkeeper. GST only becomes your problem after taxable turnover passes S$1 million, which is the point IRAS registration becomes compulsory. Statutory audit requires an ACRA-registered public accountant to sign.
Plenty of SMEs are exempt from audit entirely. 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. 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.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds. 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.
Outsourcing versus hiring someone
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. 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. Employer CPF adds 17 percent for staff below 55, then annual leave, medical coverage, a desk, and the accounting software licence. There's also the risk nobody prices in: 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 tipping point arrives further get more info out than most expect, generally once volume and reporting needs fill a full-time role. 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 a different situation from simply having grown.
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? 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'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.
Getting an actual quote
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. Any competent provider can price that in a day. A firm that still won't quote is telling you something.
Counting your transactions is easier than it sounds. Pull one typical month of bank statements and count the entries. 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. Average is what you want.
Insist on a written fixed fee up front, with a stated rule for what happens when volume increases. A fixed monthly fee you can budget around is worth more than a cheap hourly rate that drifts. Predictability is what you're actually buying, not the smallest figure you can find.
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