Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Blog Article
Accountant Cost Per Month in Singapore: A Real Guide
Most Singapore SMEs pay S$150 to S$600 monthly for accounting. Here's what drives the price, which services cost extra, and how outsourcing stacks up.
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. That's frustrating when you're just trying to build a budget.
So let's put actual numbers down. For most Singapore small businesses, expect to pay S$150 to S$600 a month if you're under 300 transactions monthly. 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. But most owners reading this will land in that S$150 to S$600 band. Budget against that one.
Why quotes differ so much
The common mistake is assuming the wrong variable. it's not about how much money you make. 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. An e-commerce store doing S$200,000 across 900 small orders, complete with gateway fees, returns and disputes, takes many times the hours. The smaller business pays more. 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. 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. By hand. Scale the transactions and you scale the exceptions with them, it has thirty times the opportunities for something to go wrong.
Some other factors move the price too:
- Staff payroll: billed per head monthly, with enormous variation between firms, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask.
- GST filing: usually S$80 to S$200 extra per return if your business is GST-registered.
- Backlog reconstruction: when nobody's touched the accounts since incorporation, that's reconstruction. It's a one-off project fee, not a monthly rate.
- Xero and copyright subscriptions: 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. Only pay for the cadence you'll actually open.
- Group structures: 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 deserves its own explanation because the quotes look irrational. Quotes range from single digits to S$80 per employee. They're usually describing different jobs. Same word, different job.
At the low end you're getting a calculation and a payslip. The expensive end includes statutory submissions, 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. One misclassified employee means an amended filing.
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. Additional Wage is capped yearly at S$102,000 less whatever Ordinary Wage has already absorbed. Bonus payments hit the Additional Wage cap, and that's the common failure point. Easy to get wrong.
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.
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.
Why two quotes are rarely comparable
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 accounting fee singapore 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. That part alone.
Three more get billed apart. Corporate tax work is handled by a tax agent, not your bookkeeper. GST filing only matters once your taxable turnover crosses 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.
Plenty of SMEs are exempt from audit entirely. 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. An audit is a separate professional engagement with its own fee, often several thousand dollars, so knowing whether you're exempt changes your annual budget significantly. Find out where you sit.
Outsourcing versus hiring someone
This one's less close than people expect. A full-time accountant in Singapore costs somewhere between S$62,000 and S$87,000 annually 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.
Salary is the headline, not the total. Employer CPF adds 17 percent for staff below 55, then annual leave, medical coverage, a desk, and the accounting software licence. 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. 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. Until then, you're paying a salary for capacity you aren't using.
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 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 problem is when the low price reflects missing scope rather than better process.
Ask these before signing. First, does the fee include year-end financial statements, or just monthly bookkeeping? Plenty of cheap quotes stop at the monthly reconciliation and bill separately for the annual close. Second, what's the rule when transactions increase? 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. It matters more than you'd think.
Put all of it in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. Hesitation tells you plenty.
What to ask for
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. 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.
Insist on a written fixed fee up front, including what happens if your volume grows. 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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