Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Accounting Fees in Singapore: What SMEs Really Pay 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. 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. Not accounting services fees singapore helpful when you're doing a simple cash flow projection. So let's put actual numbers down. For a typical SME here, the going rate is S$150 to S$600 a month at up to 300 transactions a month. 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. Plan on it. What moves your number up or down Here's the thing most owners get wrong. the price isn't keyed to turnover. It's driven by how many transactions run through your accounts. Consider two businesses. An agency turning over S$800,000 on twelve annual invoices takes very little work. An e-commerce store doing S$200,000 across 900 small orders, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, is far more work. The smaller business pays more. A quote based purely on revenue is a placeholder, not a price. Ask them to count instead. 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 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. Manually. A business with 900 transactions doesn't just have thirty times the data of one with 30, it has thirty times the opportunities for something to go wrong. A handful of extras change the total: Payroll processing: charged per employee per month, 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 once you're registered. Clean-up: if your books are a year behind, someone has to rebuild them. Expect a separate one-time charge, which is fair, but get it quoted on its own. Software licences: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Confirm the subscription is included. How often you want reports: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them. Multiple entities: 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 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. Different scope entirely. The cheap end is usually salary computation and a payslip. The higher price includes the statutory filings, and in Singapore that means CPF. 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. 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 shifted the numbers for better-paid staff. The Additional Wage ceiling works annually, at S$102,000 minus the Ordinary Wage contributions already made that year. Bonuses fall under that second ceiling, which is where most calculation errors happen. 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. 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. 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 feed, tracking what you owe and what's owed to you, running payroll and CPF, and preparing SFRS financial statements. That's the number in the range above. Nothing else. 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, the threshold that triggers mandatory IRAS registration. And statutory audit can only be signed off by an ACRA-registered public accountant. 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. S$10 million or less in revenue, S$10 million or less in total assets, or no more than 50 staff. 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. An audit is a separate professional engagement with its own fee, often several thousand dollars, so your exemption status materially changes what you'll spend each year. Find out where you sit. Outsourcing versus hiring someone This one's less close than people expect. Hiring in-house runs somewhere between S$62,000 and S$87,000 annually once you add employer CPF, annual leave, and software. Set that against S$600 a month, or S$7,200 a year, at the top of the outsourced SME band. The salary itself is only part of it. Add 17 percent employer CPF for anyone under 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. An outsourced provider has continuity built in. 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. Before that, you're funding idle capacity. 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 not the same as just getting bigger. What a suspiciously cheap price usually means Cheap isn't automatically bad, though it deserves questions. A well-run fixed-fee practice can price below the market through efficiency alone. The concern is a price that's low because something's been left out. Check these three things. 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 happens when your volume grows? An unannounced jump at a volume threshold isn't a fixed fee. That's an opening rate. Third, who's doing the work? Ask whether you get a named contact who knows your business or a rotating queue. The difference shows up fast. Put all of it in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. Hesitation tells you plenty. What to ask for Skip the discovery call theatre and hand over three things. monthly transaction volume, number of employees, and your GST registration status. Any competent provider can price that in a day. A firm that still won't quote is telling you something. Counting your transactions is easier than it sounds. Pull one typical month of bank statements and count the entries. Include gateway payments if you're selling online. Don't use your peak month or your slowest, 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.