Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Blog Article

How Much Do Accounting Services Cost in Singapore?

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.

Try asking a Singapore accounting firm for a number and watch the subject change. Everyone wants a call before they'll say a number. Which is useless if you're only trying to forecast next year's costs.

Let's skip to what things actually cost. For most Singapore small businesses, expect to pay 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. That's the number to plan around.

What moves your number up or down

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.

Consider two businesses. An agency turning over S$800,000 on twelve annual invoices has almost nothing to reconcile. A Shopify shop doing S$200,000 through 900 tiny transactions, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, takes many times the hours. The smaller business pays more. 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. 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. an unmatched payment, a duplicated charge, a late refund, a vendor who renamed their entity. Each one needs someone to chase it down. One at a time. Scale the transactions and you scale the exceptions with them, and exceptions are where the hours go.

Beyond volume, a few things push the number up:

• Staff payroll: charged per employee per month, and the spread between providers is huge, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask.
• Quarterly GST: usually S$80 to S$200 extra per return once you're 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: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Confirm the subscription is included.
• Reporting frequency: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Only pay for the cadence you'll actually open.
• More than one company: every entity carries a separate set of accounts, so two companies rarely cost the same as one and a half.

Understanding the payroll line

Payroll deserves its own explanation because the quotes look irrational. One firm says S$8 a head, another says S$80. They're usually describing different jobs. Different scope entirely.

At the low end you're getting a calculation 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, and the employee adds 20 percent. 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 accountant fee ceiling sits at S$6,800 a month in 2026, up from S$6,300, which changed what employers owe on higher salaries. The Additional Wage ceiling works annually, at S$102,000 minus the Ordinary Wage contributions already made that year. Bonus payments hit the Additional Wage cap, and that's the common failure point. 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. The CPF deadline is the 14th of the month after, and late payment attracts interest at 1.5 percent per month.

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.

What your quote probably doesn't cover

The word "accounting" covers four distinct functions here, 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.

The recurring monthly piece is bookkeeping, 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. 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, 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. 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, frequently in the thousands, 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. A full-time accountant in Singapore costs S$62,000 to S$87,000 a year 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. Employer CPF adds 17 percent for staff below 55, then leave entitlement, medical benefits, workspace, and software. There's also the risk nobody prices in: 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.

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 justifies someone on site. 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 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? A fee that jumps without warning at 40 transactions isn't fixed. It's a starting price. Third, who's doing 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.

How to get a real number

Skip the discovery call theatre and hand over three things. Your average monthly transaction count, your headcount, and whether you're GST-registered. 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, because a quote built on an unrepresentative month will get revised later. 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.

Report this page