Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Blog Article
Accounting Fees in Singapore: What SMEs Really Pay
What does a Singapore accountant cost? Most SMEs pay S$150 to S$600 monthly. See what sets the price, what isn't included, and when hiring in-house wins.
Try asking a Singapore accounting firm for a number and watch the subject change. 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.
So let's put actual numbers down. 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 actually drives the price
Here's the thing most owners get wrong. the price isn't keyed to turnover. What matters is the number of lines your accountant has to touch.
Consider two businesses. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve invoices takes very little work. 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 one with less revenue pays the bigger fee. Any firm quoting you off turnover alone hasn't looked at your books. Volume, not revenue.
The reason volume dominates is mechanical. Every transaction has to be recorded, categorised, and matched against accountancy services 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.
Beyond volume, a few things push the number up:
- Payroll: charged per employee per month, with enormous variation between firms, anywhere from single digits to S$30 or S$80 per person.
- GST filing: usually S$80 to S$200 extra per return if your business is GST-registered.
- Clean-up: when nobody's touched the accounts since incorporation, that's reconstruction. It's a one-off project fee, not a monthly rate.
- Accounting software: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in.
- How often you want reports: asking for monthly numbers costs more than a once-a-year close. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them.
- More than one company: every entity carries a separate set of accounts, so two companies rarely cost the same as one and a half.
Why payroll pricing varies so wildly
Payroll pricing confuses people, and the reason is scope. One firm says S$8 a head, another says S$80. They're usually describing different jobs. Different scope entirely.
The cheap end is usually salary computation and a payslip. The higher price includes the statutory filings, and in Singapore that means CPF. 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 changed what employers owe on higher salaries. 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. 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, and late payment attracts interest at 1.5 percent per month.
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
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. Nothing else.
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, 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 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. A full-time accountant in Singapore costs S$62,000 to S$87,000 a year after employer CPF contributions, leave, and the subscriptions. Compare that to roughly S$7,200 a year at the upper end of the outsourced range.
The salary itself is only part of it. 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: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. An outsourced provider has continuity built in. Nobody prices that in.
Outsourcing is cheaper for the majority of SMEs. The tipping point arrives further out than most expect, generally once volume and reporting needs fill a full-time role. Until then, you're paying a salary for capacity you aren't using.
The honest exception is complexity, not size. 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 a different situation from simply having grown.
Warning signs in a quote
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 problem is when the low price reflects missing scope rather than better process.
Ask these before signing. 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 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? Find out whether there's a named accountant or a shared inbox. 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.
How to get a real number
Skip the discovery call theatre and hand over three things. monthly transaction volume, number of employees, and your GST registration status. 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. 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, 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. Predictability is what you're actually buying, not the smallest figure you can find.
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