Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Singapore Accountant Fees: What Really Drives Your Quote
Most Singapore SMEs pay S$150 to S$600 monthly for accounting. Here's what drives the price, which services cost extra, and how outsourcing stacks up.
Try asking a Singapore accounting firm for a number and watch the subject change. You'll hear "it depends on your requirements" and get pushed toward a discovery call. Not helpful when you're doing a simple cash flow projection.
Here are the real figures. For the average Pte Ltd or sole proprietorship, monthly accounting and bookkeeping runs S$150 to S$600 a month for light to moderate transaction volumes. Across the whole market the range stretches further, from about S$80 a month at the very light end to S$2,000 or more for complex operations. But most owners reading this will land in that S$150 to S$600 band. Plan on it.
What actually drives the price
This is where most people misjudge it. it's not about how much money you make. What matters is the number of lines your accountant has to touch.
Picture two companies. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve 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. Revenue tells you nothing here. Any firm quoting you off turnover alone hasn't looked at your books. Make them count the lines.
The reason volume dominates is mechanical. Each line needs recording, categorising, and reconciling to the copyright. 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. Those need a human to investigate. One at a time. 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: 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 once you're 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.
Software licences: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Confirm the subscription is included.
Management reporting: asking for monthly numbers costs more than a once-a-year close. Only pay for the cadence you'll actually open.
Multiple entities: each company needs its own books and its own filings, so the second entity costs close to a full second fee.
Why payroll pricing varies so wildly
Payroll deserves its own explanation because the quotes look irrational. One firm says S$8 a head, another says S$80. They're often not describing the same work. Same word, different job.
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. Employer CPF contributions run 17 percent of wages for employees under 55, and the employee adds 20 percent. The rates taper as employees get older. 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.
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. 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. 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. The CPF deadline is the 14th of the month after, with 1.5 percent monthly interest on anything overdue.
So when you compare payroll quotes, ask what's included. Paying more for correct statutory submissions can beat paying less and doing the filings yourself.
What your quote probably doesn't cover
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 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. 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 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. Find out where you sit.
Is a full-time hire cheaper
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. Compare that to roughly S$7,200 a year at the upper end of the outsourced range.
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. There's also the risk nobody prices in: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. 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.
Where in-house wins is complexity. 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 accountancy services 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.
Check these three things. First, does the fee include year-end financial statements, or just monthly bookkeeping? Many low quotes cover reconciliation and charge again for the year-end. 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? Ask whether you get a named contact who knows your business or a rotating queue. It matters more than you'd think.
Get the answers in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. If they stall, that's your answer.
What to ask for
Give any firm these three things and they can quote you properly, no consultation needed. 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 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. 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. Predictability is what you're actually buying, not the smallest figure you can find.