Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

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How Much Do Accounting Services Cost 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. That's frustrating when you're just trying to build a budget.

Here are the real figures. For a typical SME here, expect to pay 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 moves your number up or down

The common mistake is assuming the wrong variable. Your fee isn't set by revenue. What matters is the number of lines your accountant has to touch.

Picture two companies. An agency turning over S$800,000 on twelve annual invoices costs almost nothing to service. An e-commerce store doing S$200,000 across 900 small orders, complete with gateway fees, returns and disputes, is far more work. The one with less revenue pays the bigger fee. A quote based purely on revenue is a placeholder, not a price. Ask them to count instead.

The reason volume dominates is mechanical. Every transaction has to be recorded, categorised, and matched against 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. 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. Manually. A business with 900 transactions doesn't just have thirty times the data of one with 30, and exceptions are where the hours go.

Some other factors move the price too:

• 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: 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. 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. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in.
• Reporting frequency: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them.
• More than one company: each company needs its own books and its own filings, so two companies rarely cost the same as one and a half.

Why payroll pricing varies so wildly

Payroll deserves its own explanation because the quotes look irrational. 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. For staff below 55, the employer contributes 17 percent, with the employee contributing 20 percent on top. 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. 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 shifted the numbers for better-paid staff. 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, at 0.25 percent of gross wages, capped between roughly S$10 and S$17 per employee monthly. The CPF deadline is the 14th of the month after, with 1.5 percent monthly interest on anything overdue.

So when you compare payroll quotes, ask what's included. 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.

Why two quotes are rarely comparable

In Singapore, "accounting" gets used to how much does a tax accountant cost describe four separate regulated jobs, 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.

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 number in the range above. That part alone.

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, the threshold that triggers mandatory IRAS registration. 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. Audit is a distinct engagement carrying its own cost, frequently in the thousands, 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. A full-time accountant in Singapore costs somewhere between S$62,000 and S$87,000 annually once you add employer CPF, annual leave, and software. Compare that to roughly S$7,200 a year at the upper end of the outsourced range.

Salary is the headline, not the total. Employer CPF adds 17 percent for staff below 55, then leave entitlement, medical benefits, workspace, and software. And there's a risk that rarely appears in the comparison: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. An outsourced provider has continuity built in. That's a real risk.

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.

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 benefits from someone in the building. That's not the same as just getting bigger.

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.

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? An unannounced jump at a volume threshold isn't a fixed fee. That's an opening rate. Third, who actually does the work? Find out whether there's a named accountant or a shared inbox. The difference shows up fast.

Get the answers in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. 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. 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. 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. 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, with a stated rule for what happens when volume increases. A fixed monthly figure agreed upfront beats an hourly rate you can't forecast. That's the whole game with accounting fees: predictability, not the lowest number on the page.

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