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

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.

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.

So let's put actual numbers down. 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. 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

Here's the thing most owners get wrong. 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 costs almost nothing to service. An e-commerce store doing S$200,000 across 900 small orders, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, costs considerably more to handle. The one with less revenue pays the bigger fee. Any firm quoting you off turnover alone hasn't looked at your books. Make them count the lines.

It's worth understanding why volume matters so much. 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. Each one needs someone to chase it down. One at a time. Scale the transactions and you scale the exceptions with them, it has thirty times the opportunities for something to go wrong.

A handful of extras change the total:

• Staff payroll: billed per head monthly, with enormous variation between firms, anywhere from single digits to S$30 or S$80 per person.
• GST returns: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing if your business is GST-registered.
• Clean-up: 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: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in.
• How often you want reports: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them.
• More than one company: each company needs its own books and its own filings, so the second entity costs close to a full second fee.

Understanding the payroll line

Payroll pricing confuses people, and the reason is scope. One firm says S$8 a head, another says S$80. They're usually describing different jobs. Scope explains the gap.

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, and the employee adds 20 percent. 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 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. 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, 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.

Why two quotes are rarely comparable

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.

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 fee we've been discussing. Nothing else.

The other three are separate engagements. Corporate tax filing, meaning your ECI and Form C-S, goes to a registered tax agent. GST only becomes your problem after taxable turnover passes 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. S$10 million or less in revenue, S$10 million or less in total assets, or no more than 50 staff. 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.

This is a bigger deal than it sounds. An audit is a separate professional engagement with its own fee, frequently in the thousands, so knowing whether you're exempt changes your annual budget significantly. Check which side you're on.

Outsourcing versus hiring someone

The math here is one-sided for smaller firms. Hiring in-house runs somewhere between S$62,000 and S$87,000 annually after employer CPF contributions, leave, and the subscriptions. 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 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 tipping point arrives further out than most expect, generally once volume and reporting needs fill a full-time role. Until then, you're paying a salary for capacity you aren't using.

Where in-house wins is complexity. Multi-warehouse inventory, multi-currency exposure, and decisions that copyright on same-day figures benefits accountant cost per month from someone in the building. That's a different situation from simply having grown.

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 concern is a price that's low because something's been left out.

Ask these before signing. 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 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.

Put all of it in writing. A provider confident in their pricing will commit to it. Hesitation tells you plenty.

Getting an actual quote

Skip the discovery call theatre and hand over three things. monthly transaction volume, number of employees, and your GST registration status. 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. Pull one typical month of bank statements and count the entries. Include gateway payments if you're selling online. Avoid picking your busiest month or your quietest, because a quote built on an unrepresentative month will get revised later. Average is what you want.

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.

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