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

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.

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.

Here are the real figures. For a typical SME here, monthly accounting and bookkeeping runs S$150 to S$600 a month if you're under 300 transactions monthly. The full market spread is wider, 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.

Why quotes differ so much

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. An agency turning over S$800,000 on twelve annual invoices takes very little work. A Shopify shop doing S$200,000 through 900 tiny transactions, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, 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. Make them count the lines.

It's worth understanding why volume matters so much. Each line needs recording, categorising, and reconciling to the copyright. 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. Those need a human to investigate. 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:

• 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: usually S$80 to S$200 extra per return if your business is GST-registered.
• Backlog reconstruction: 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.
• Reporting frequency: 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.

What payroll really adds to the bill

Payroll deserves its own explanation because the quotes look irrational. Quotes range from single digits to S$80 per employee. They're often not describing the same work. Same word, different job.

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, 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. Getting the age band wrong on a single employee means a correction and a resubmission.

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. Bonus payments hit the Additional Wage cap, and that's the common failure point. Worth double-checking.

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. 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.

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 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. 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.

This is a bigger deal than it sounds. 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.

Outsourcing versus hiring someone

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 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 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 tipping point arrives further out than most expect, 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 not the same as just getting bigger.

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 concern is a price that's singapore bookkeeping services low because something's been left out.

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

Get the answers 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. Your average monthly transaction count, your headcount, and whether you're GST-registered. 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. Avoid picking your busiest month or your quietest, since an atypical month produces a quote that changes on you. Pick a boring month.

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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