Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

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What Small Business Accounting Costs You in Singapore

Real Singapore accounting fees: S$150 to S$600 a month for most small firms. Learn what moves your quote, what's billed separately, and how to compare.

Most Singapore accounting quotes arrive as "it depends," which helps nobody. You'll hear "it depends on your requirements" and get pushed toward a discovery call. Not helpful when you're doing a simple cash flow projection.

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 if you're under 300 transactions monthly. 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. Plan on it.

What actually drives the price

The common mistake is assuming the wrong variable. the price isn't keyed to turnover. It's driven by how accounting services pricing many transactions run through your accounts.

Picture two companies. 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, costs considerably more to handle. The one with less revenue pays the bigger fee. 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 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. Those need a human to investigate. Manually. 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 processing: billed per head monthly, with enormous variation between firms, 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: when nobody's touched the accounts since incorporation, that's reconstruction. Expect a separate one-time charge, which is fair, but get it quoted on its own.
• Xero and copyright subscriptions: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. Confirm the subscription is included.
• Management reporting: asking for monthly numbers costs more than a once-a-year close. Only pay for the cadence you'll actually open.
• Multiple entities: 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 usually describing different jobs. Scope explains the gap.

The cheap end is usually salary computation 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, 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.

Ceilings complicate it further. As of 2026 the Ordinary Wage ceiling is S$6,800 monthly, raised 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. Worth double-checking.

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. CPF submissions are due by the 14th of the following month, with 1.5 percent monthly interest on anything overdue.

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.

The four jobs hiding under one word

The word "accounting" covers four distinct functions here, 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.

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 number in the range above. Nothing else.

The other three are separate engagements. 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. 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 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 knowing whether you're exempt changes your annual budget significantly. Check which side you're on.

In-house or outsourced

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. Set that against S$600 a month, or S$7,200 a year, at the top of the outsourced SME band.

The salary itself is only part of it. 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 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 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 problem is when the low price reflects missing scope rather than better process.

Ask these before signing. 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? A fee that jumps without warning at 40 transactions isn't fixed. It's a starting price. 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. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. Hesitation tells you plenty.

How to get a real number

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. Open your business copyright for a normal month and count the lines. Include gateway payments if you're selling online. Don't use your peak month or your slowest, since an atypical month produces a quote that changes on you. Pick a boring month.

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. That's the whole game with accounting fees: predictability, not the lowest number on the page.

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