Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Blog Article

Accounting Fees Singapore: A Straight Answer on Price

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.

Getting a straight price out of a Singapore accounting firm is weirdly hard. 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 a typical SME here, the going rate is 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 for complex operations. 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. It's driven by how many transactions run through your accounts.

Take two examples. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve invoices costs almost nothing to service. 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.

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 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. 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.

Some other factors move the price too:

• Staff payroll: charged per employee per month, 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.
• Catch-up work: if your books are a year behind, someone has to rebuild them. It's a one-off project fee, not a monthly rate.
• Accounting software: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in.
• 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 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. One firm says S$8 a head, another says S$80. They're often not describing the same work. 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.

There's also a wage ceiling to track. As of 2026 the Ordinary Wage ceiling is S$6,800 monthly, raised 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.

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. CPF submissions are due by the 14th of the following month, 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, 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.

The recurring monthly piece is bookkeeping, covering bank reconciliation, accounts payable and receivable, payroll with CPF submissions, and SFRS-compliant year-end statements. That's the number in the range above. 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. 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.

This is a bigger deal than it sounds. Audit is a distinct engagement carrying its own cost, often several thousand dollars, so knowing whether you're exempt changes your annual budget significantly. Find out where you sit.

In-house or outsourced

This one's less close than people expect. Hiring in-house runs somewhere between S$62,000 and S$87,000 annually 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.

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: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. An how much does it cost to hire a bookkeeper outsourced provider has continuity built in. Nobody prices that in.

For most small businesses, outsourcing wins comfortably. The crossover comes later than owners assume, usually when transaction volume, headcount and reporting demands justify a dedicated person. Before that, you're funding idle capacity.

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.

What a suspiciously cheap price usually means

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, are year-end statements included or is this monthly work only? Many low quotes cover reconciliation and charge again for the year-end. Second, what's the rule when transactions increase? An unannounced jump at a volume threshold isn't a fixed fee. That's an opening rate. Third, who actually does the work? Ask whether you get a named contact who knows your business or a rotating queue. It matters more than you'd think.

Put all of it in writing. A provider confident in their pricing will commit to it. Hesitation tells you plenty.

What to ask for

Skip the discovery call theatre and hand over three things. 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. 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. 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.

Report this page