Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
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Accountant Cost Per Month in Singapore: A Real Guide
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.
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.
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. The full market spread is wider, 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. That's the number to plan around.
What actually drives the price
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.
Picture two companies. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve invoices takes very little work. An e-commerce store doing S$200,000 across 900 small orders, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, takes many times the hours. The one with less revenue pays the bigger fee. 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. A tidy transaction takes seconds. The expense lives in the ones that don't match, and they look like website this. an unmatched payment, a duplicated charge, a late refund, a vendor who renamed their entity. Each one needs someone to chase it down. Manually. 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:
- 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 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.
- Xero and copyright subscriptions: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in.
- 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.
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. Scope explains the gap.
At the low end you're getting a calculation and a payslip. The expensive end includes statutory submissions, and CPF is the bulk of it. 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 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.
There's also a wage ceiling to track. As of 2026 the Ordinary Wage ceiling is S$6,800 monthly, raised 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. 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, and late payment attracts interest at 1.5 percent per month.
So when you compare payroll quotes, ask what's included. 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.
The four jobs hiding under one word
The word "accounting" covers four distinct functions here, but just one is what you need every month. It explains how one firm quotes S$1,200 and another S$250 without either being dishonest.
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 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 only becomes your problem after taxable turnover passes S$1 million, which is the point IRAS registration becomes compulsory. And statutory audit can only be signed off by an ACRA-registered public accountant.
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. 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.
That exemption matters more than most owners realise. Audit is a distinct engagement carrying its own cost, often several thousand dollars, so knowing whether you're exempt changes your annual budget significantly. Find out where you sit.
Outsourcing versus hiring someone
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. Employer CPF adds 17 percent for staff below 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.
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. 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 problem is when the low price reflects missing scope rather than better process.
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? An unannounced jump at a volume threshold isn't a fixed fee. It's a starting price. Third, who actually does 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.
Getting an actual quote
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. 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. Add your payment gateway transactions if you sell 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.
Insist on a written fixed fee up front, 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.
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