Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

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Bookkeeping Services Singapore Price: The Real Range

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. Everyone wants a call before they'll say a number. 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, monthly accounting and bookkeeping runs S$150 to S$600 a month for light to moderate transaction volumes. The full market spread is wider, from about S$80 a month at the very light end to S$2,000 or more cost to hire an accountant for complex operations. But most owners reading this will land in that S$150 to S$600 band. Budget against that one.

What actually drives the price

This is where most people misjudge it. the price isn't keyed to turnover. It's driven by how many transactions run through your accounts.

Picture two companies. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve invoices takes very little work. A Shopify shop doing S$200,000 through 900 tiny transactions, 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. Make them count the lines.

The reason volume dominates is mechanical. Each line needs recording, categorising, and reconciling to the copyright. 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. Each one needs someone to chase it down. One at a time. 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:

• 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.
• Quarterly GST: 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. It's a one-off project fee, not a monthly rate.
• Accounting software: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. Confirm the subscription is included.
• How often you want reports: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them.
• Multiple entities: each company needs its own books and its own filings, 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. Scope explains the gap.

At the low end you're getting a calculation and a payslip. The higher price includes the statutory filings, 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 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.

Ceilings complicate it further. 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. CPF submissions are due by the 14th of the following month, 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

The word "accounting" covers four distinct functions here, and only one of them is the monthly work. This is why a S$1,200 quote and a S$250 quote can both be honest.

The recurring monthly piece is bookkeeping, 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.

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. 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. revenue at or under S$10 million, total assets at or under S$10 million, or 50 or fewer employees. The company must be private for the whole financial year too, 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. Audit is a distinct engagement carrying its own cost, often several thousand dollars, so your exemption status materially changes what you'll spend each year. Check which side you're on.

Is a full-time hire cheaper

The math here is one-sided for smaller firms. Hiring in-house runs somewhere between S$62,000 and S$87,000 annually 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. Add 17 percent employer CPF for anyone under 55, then leave entitlement, medical benefits, workspace, and software. And there's a risk that rarely appears in the comparison: when a single in-house accountant leaves, the function stops with them. A firm has cover. One person is a single point of failure.

Outsourcing is cheaper for the majority of SMEs. The crossover comes later than owners assume, 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 benefits from someone in the building. That's a different situation from simply having grown.

What a suspiciously cheap price usually means

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 problem is when the low price reflects missing scope rather than better process.

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 happens when your volume grows? 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. The difference shows up fast.

Get the answers 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

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. Any competent provider can price that in a day. A firm that still won't quote is telling you something.

Counting your transaction volume takes ten minutes. Pull one typical month of bank statements and count the entries. 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.

Get the fee confirmed in writing before you sign, 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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