Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Blog Article

Accounting Fees Singapore: A Straight Answer on Price

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.

Ask three Singapore firms what they charge and you'll get three non-answers. 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 a typical SME here, 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. The vast majority of small businesses sit in the narrower range. Plan on it.

What actually drives the price

The common mistake is assuming the wrong variable. Your fee isn't set by revenue. What matters is the number of lines your accountant has to touch.

Consider two businesses. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve invoices costs almost nothing to service. 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 cost sits in the exceptions, 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 someone to chase it down. 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:

• 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.
• GST returns: 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. Expect a separate one-time charge, which is fair, but get it quoted on its own.
• Accounting software: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in.
• How often you want reports: asking for monthly numbers costs more than a once-a-year close. Only pay for the cadence you'll actually open.
• Group structures: 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. 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.

There's also a wage ceiling to track. 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. Check that one twice.

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.

Before comparing payroll prices, establish scope. Paying more for correct statutory submissions can beat paying less and doing the filings yourself.

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.

Monthly bookkeeping is the first, 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 filing, meaning your ECI and Form C-S, goes to a registered tax agent. GST filing only matters once your taxable turnover crosses S$1 million, which is the point IRAS registration becomes compulsory. Statutory audit requires an ACRA-registered public accountant to sign.

Most small companies never need that audit. 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 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. 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. Check which side you're on.

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. 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: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. A firm has cover. 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 justifies someone on site. That's a different situation from simply having grown.

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 bookkeeping fee can price below the market through efficiency alone. The problem is when the low price reflects missing scope rather than better process.

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? A fee that jumps without warning at 40 transactions isn't fixed. That's an opening rate. 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.

Put all of it in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. Hesitation tells you plenty.

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. 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 transactions is easier than it sounds. Pull one typical month of bank statements and count the entries. 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, with a stated rule for what happens when volume increases. A fixed monthly fee you can budget around is worth more than a cheap hourly rate that drifts. That's the whole game with accounting fees: predictability, not the lowest number on the page.

Report this page