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.
Try asking a Singapore accounting firm for a number and watch the subject change. You'll hear "it depends on your requirements" and get pushed toward a discovery call. That's frustrating when you're just trying to build a budget.
Here are the real figures. For the average Pte Ltd or sole proprietorship, 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. The vast majority of small businesses sit in the narrower range. That's the number to plan around.
What moves your number up or down
This is where most people misjudge it. it's not about how much money you make. What matters is the number of lines your accountant has to touch.
Consider two businesses. An agency turning over S$800,000 on twelve annual invoices has almost nothing to reconcile. A Shopify shop doing S$200,000 through 900 tiny transactions, 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. Make them count the lines.
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 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. Those need a human to investigate. By hand. 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:
- 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 once you're 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.
- Reporting frequency: asking for monthly numbers costs more than a once-a-year close. Only pay for the cadence you'll actually open.
- More than one company: every entity carries a separate set of accounts, 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. Same word, different job.
At the low end you're getting a calculation and a payslip. The expensive end includes statutory submissions, and CPF is the bulk of it. 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. 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. Bonuses fall under that second ceiling, which is where most calculation errors happen. Easy to get wrong.
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 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, 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.
Monthly bookkeeping is the first, 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. Just that.
Three more get billed apart. Corporate tax filing, meaning your ECI and Form C-S, goes to a registered tax agent. 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. 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, accounting fees 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 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, often several thousand dollars, so your exemption status materially changes what you'll spend each year. Check which side you're on.
In-house or outsourced
This one's less close than people expect. Hiring in-house runs S$62,000 to S$87,000 a year 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 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. Nobody prices that in.
Outsourcing is cheaper for the majority of SMEs. The crossover comes later than owners assume, usually when transaction volume, headcount and reporting demands justify a dedicated person. 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.
Warning signs in a quote
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.
Check these three things. First, does the fee include year-end financial statements, or just monthly bookkeeping? Plenty of cheap quotes stop at the monthly reconciliation and bill separately for the annual close. Second, what happens when your volume grows? 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.
Put all of it 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. monthly transaction volume, number of employees, and your GST registration status. 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. Pull one typical month of bank statements and count the entries. 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. 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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