Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown
Blog Article
What Does an Accountant Cost in Singapore in 2026?
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.
Getting a straight price out of a Singapore accounting firm is weirdly hard. 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 most Singapore small businesses, monthly accounting and bookkeeping runs S$150 to S$600 a month if you're under 300 transactions monthly. The full market spread is wider, roughly S$80 monthly for the smallest setups up to S$2,000 plus for books that have gone properly complicated. But most owners reading this will land in that S$150 to S$600 band. Plan on it.
Why quotes differ so much
This is where most people misjudge it. Your fee isn't set by revenue. It's driven by how many transactions run through your accounts.
Take two examples. 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, is far more work. 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. 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. an unmatched payment, a duplicated charge, a late refund, a vendor who renamed their entity. Those need a human to investigate. By hand. 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:
- Payroll: billed per head monthly, with enormous variation between firms, anywhere from single digits to S$30 or S$80 per person.
- GST filing: 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.
- Xero and copyright subscriptions: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. 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.
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. Same word, different job.
At the low end you're getting a calculation and a payslip. The higher price includes the statutory filings, and CPF is the bulk of it. For staff below 55, the employer contributes 17 percent, 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. One misclassified employee means an amended filing.
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. Bonus payments hit the Additional accounting fees for small business Wage cap, and that's the common failure point. Worth double-checking.
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. Paying more for correct statutory submissions can beat paying less and doing the filings yourself.
What your quote probably doesn't cover
In Singapore, "accounting" gets used to describe four separate regulated jobs, and only one of them is the monthly work. This is why a S$1,200 quote and a S$250 quote can both be honest.
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 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 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. 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, frequently in the thousands, so your exemption status materially changes what you'll spend each year. Find out where you sit.
Is a full-time hire cheaper
The math here is one-sided for smaller firms. A full-time accountant in Singapore costs S$62,000 to S$87,000 a year 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.
The salary itself is only part of it. Employer CPF adds 17 percent for staff below 55, then annual leave, medical coverage, a desk, and the accounting software licence. 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. That's a real risk.
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. Before that, you're funding idle capacity.
The honest exception is complexity, not size. A business with inventory across multiple warehouses, foreign currency exposure, and daily management decisions that depend on live numbers justifies someone on site. That's not the same as just getting bigger.
Warning signs in a quote
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 problem is when the low price reflects missing scope rather than better process.
Ask these before signing. First, are year-end statements included or is this monthly work only? Many low quotes cover reconciliation and charge again for the year-end. 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'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.
Put all of it in writing. A provider confident in their pricing will commit to it. Hesitation tells you plenty.
Getting an actual quote
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. If they still won't commit to a number, that tells you something.
Counting your transactions is easier than it sounds. 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.
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. That's the whole game with accounting fees: predictability, not the lowest number on the page.
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