Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Singapore Bookkeeping Fees: What You Should Be Paying 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. Ask three Singapore firms what they charge and you'll get three non-answers. 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 the average Pte Ltd or sole proprietorship, expect to pay S$150 to S$600 a month for light to moderate transaction volumes. 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. But most owners reading this will land in that S$150 to S$600 band. Budget against that one. What moves your number up or down Here's the thing most owners get wrong. 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 has almost nothing to reconcile. A Shopify shop doing S$200,000 through 900 tiny transactions, complete with gateway fees, returns and disputes, costs considerably more to handle. The smaller business pays more. Any firm quoting you off turnover alone hasn't looked at your books. Volume, not revenue. 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 cost sits in the exceptions, and they look like this. an unmatched payment, a duplicated charge, a late refund, a vendor who renamed their entity. Those need a human to investigate. By hand. Scale the transactions and you scale the exceptions with them, and exceptions are where the hours go. A handful of extras change the total: Payroll processing: charged per employee per month, with enormous variation between firms, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask. Quarterly GST: 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. Xero and copyright subscriptions: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in. Management reporting: 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. 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 usually describing different jobs. Same word, different job. 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. 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. The Ordinary Wage ceiling sits at S$6,800 a month in 2026, up 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. Then there's the Skills Development Levy, charged at 0.25 percent of gross wages with a monthly cap in the S$10 to S$17 range. 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. It explains how one firm quotes S$1,200 and another S$250 without either being dishonest. 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 fee we've been discussing. Just that. The other three are separate engagements. Corporate tax filing, meaning your ECI and Form C-S, goes to a registered tax agent. GST filing only matters once your taxable turnover crosses 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. You qualify for the small company exemption if you meet two of three tests, 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 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 S$62,000 to S$87,000 a year 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. 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. An outsourced provider has continuity built in. 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. 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 cost of accounting services is a price that's low because something's been left out. Ask these before signing. 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'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. The difference shows up fast. Put all of it in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. Hesitation tells you plenty. Getting an actual quote Skip the discovery call theatre and hand over three things. monthly transaction volume, number of employees, and your GST registration status. That's enough for a firm to give you a fixed figure quickly. If they still won't commit to a number, that tells you something. Counting your transaction volume takes ten minutes. Open your business copyright for a normal month and count the lines. 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, with a stated rule for what happens when volume increases. 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.