Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

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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.

Ask three Singapore firms what they charge and you'll get three non-answers. Everyone wants a call before they'll say a number. Not helpful when you're doing a simple cash flow projection.

Let's skip to what things actually cost. For a typical SME here, expect to pay 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. But most owners reading this will land in that S$150 to S$600 band. That's the number to plan around.

What moves your number up or down

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. An e-commerce store doing S$200,000 across 900 small orders, complete with gateway fees, returns and disputes, is far more work. Revenue tells you nothing here. Any firm quoting you off turnover alone hasn't looked at your books. Ask them to count instead.

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. Manually. Scale the transactions and you scale the exceptions with them, and exceptions are where the hours go.

Beyond volume, a few things push the number up:

• Payroll processing: 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 filing: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing if your business is GST-registered.
• Backlog reconstruction: 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.
• Software licences: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. Confirm the subscription is included.
• Management reporting: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Only pay for the cadence you'll actually open.
• More than one company: every entity carries a separate set of accounts, so two companies rarely cost the same as one and a half.

What payroll really adds to the bill

Payroll deserves its own explanation because the quotes look irrational. One firm says S$8 a head, another says S$80. 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, and the employee adds 20 percent. 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. 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. Bonus payments hit the Additional Wage cap, and that's the common failure point. Worth double-checking.

SDL sits on top of that, 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, and late payment attracts interest at 1.5 percent per month.

Before comparing payroll prices, establish scope. A firm charging more but handling CPF and SDL submissions correctly may be cheaper than one that computes payslips and leaves the filings to you.

What your quote probably doesn't cover

The word "accounting" covers four distinct functions here, but just one is what you need every month. It explains how one firm quotes S$1,200 and another S$250 without either being dishonest.

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.

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, which is the point IRAS registration becomes compulsory. Statutory audit requires an ACRA-registered public accountant to sign.

Most small companies never need that audit. 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. You also need to be a private company throughout the financial year, 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.

That exemption matters more than most owners realise. An audit is a separate professional engagement with its own fee, frequently in the thousands, 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. 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. Add 17 percent employer CPF for anyone under 55, then annual leave, medical coverage, a desk, and the accounting software licence. 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.

For most small businesses, outsourcing wins comfortably. The crossover comes later than owners assume, generally once volume and reporting needs fill a full-time role. Until then, you're paying a salary for capacity you aren't using.

Where in-house wins is complexity. A business with inventory across multiple warehouses, foreign currency exposure, and daily management decisions that depend on live numbers justifies someone on site. That's not the same as just getting bigger.

Red flags worth checking

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.

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 how much does hiring an accountant cost jumps without warning at 40 transactions isn't fixed. 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.

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

How to get a real number

Skip the discovery call theatre and hand over three things. 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. 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. Don't use your peak month or your slowest, 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. That's the whole game with accounting fees: predictability, not the lowest number on the page.

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