Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Blog Article
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. Everyone wants a call before they'll say a number. Which is useless if you're only trying to forecast next year's costs.
Here are the real figures. For a typical SME here, expect to pay 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
Here's the thing most owners get wrong. Your fee isn't set by revenue. What matters is the number of lines your accountant has to touch.
Consider two businesses. 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, takes many times the hours. The one with less revenue pays the bigger fee. A quote based purely on revenue is a placeholder, not a price. Volume, not revenue.
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 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 accountancy services 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.
Beyond volume, a few things push the number up:
- Payroll: billed per head monthly, with enormous variation between firms, anywhere from single digits to S$30 or S$80 per person.
- GST filing: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing if your business is GST-registered.
- Backlog reconstruction: 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: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Confirm the subscription is included.
- Reporting frequency: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them.
- Group structures: every entity carries a separate set of accounts, so two companies rarely cost the same as one and a half.
What payroll really adds to the bill
Payroll pricing confuses people, and the reason is scope. 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 in Singapore that means CPF. Employer CPF contributions run 17 percent of wages for employees under 55, 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. Getting the age band wrong on a single employee means a correction and a resubmission.
Ceilings complicate it further. 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. 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.
What your quote probably doesn't cover
In Singapore, "accounting" gets used to describe four separate regulated jobs, but just one is what you need every month. This is why a S$1,200 quote and a S$250 quote can both be honest.
Monthly bookkeeping is the first, covering reconciling your bank 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 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.
Plenty of SMEs are exempt from audit entirely. 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. The company must be private for the whole financial year too, 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.
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
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 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. Add 17 percent employer CPF for anyone under 55, then annual leave, medical coverage, a desk, and the accounting software licence. There's also the risk nobody prices in: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. A firm has cover. That's a real risk.
For most small businesses, outsourcing wins comfortably. 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.
The honest exception is complexity, not size. Multi-warehouse inventory, multi-currency exposure, and decisions that copyright on same-day figures benefits from someone in the building. 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.
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? A fee that jumps without warning at 40 transactions isn't fixed. 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. A provider confident in their pricing will commit to it. 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. Add your payment gateway transactions if you sell 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. That's the whole game with accounting fees: predictability, not the lowest number on the page.
Report this page