Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

How Much Do Accounting Services Cost in Singapore?

Singapore accounting fees run S$150 to S$600 a month for how much does accounting service cost in singapore most SMEs. Here's what drives your quote, what's excluded, and how outsourcing compares to hiring.

Most Singapore accounting quotes arrive as "it depends," which helps nobody. You'll hear "it depends on your requirements" and get pushed toward a discovery call. Which is useless if you're only trying to forecast next year's costs.

Let's skip to what things actually cost. For a typical SME here, the going rate is S$150 to S$600 a month at up to 300 transactions a month. Across the whole market the range stretches further, roughly S$80 monthly for the smallest setups up to S$2,000 plus for books that have gone properly complicated. The vast majority of small businesses sit in the narrower range. Plan on it.

Why quotes differ so much

Here's the thing most owners get wrong. it's not about how much money you make. It's set by transaction volume.

Picture two companies. 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, complete with gateway fees, returns and disputes, takes many times the hours. Revenue tells you nothing here. Any firm quoting you off turnover alone hasn't looked at your books. Ask them to count instead.

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, it has thirty times the opportunities for something to go wrong.

Beyond volume, a few things push the number up:

Payroll: charged per employee per month, with enormous variation between firms, anywhere from single digits to S$30 or S$80 per person.
GST filing: usually S$80 to S$200 extra per return if your business is GST-registered.
Catch-up work: 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.
Management reporting: 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 two companies rarely cost the same as one and a half.

Why payroll pricing varies so wildly

Payroll pricing confuses people, and the reason is scope. Quotes range from single digits to S$80 per employee. They're often not describing the same work. Same word, different job.

The cheap end is usually salary computation and a payslip. The higher price includes the statutory filings, 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. 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. As of 2026 the Ordinary Wage ceiling is S$6,800 monthly, raised from S$6,300, which shifted the numbers for better-paid staff. 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.

Then there's the Skills Development Levy, 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.

Before comparing payroll prices, establish scope. 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

In Singapore, "accounting" gets used to describe four separate regulated jobs, 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.

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 number in the range above. 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 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. 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 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, frequently in the thousands, so knowing whether you're exempt changes your annual budget significantly. Find out where you sit.

In-house or outsourced

This one's less close than people expect. 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. Add 17 percent employer CPF for anyone under 55, then leave entitlement, medical benefits, workspace, and software. And there's a risk that rarely appears in the comparison: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. An outsourced provider has continuity built in. Nobody prices that in.

Outsourcing is cheaper for the majority of SMEs. The crossover comes later than owners assume, generally once volume and reporting needs fill a full-time role. 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 benefits from someone in the building. That's not the same as just getting bigger.

Red flags worth checking

Cheap isn't automatically bad, though it deserves questions. 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.

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's the rule when transactions increase? A fee that jumps without warning at 40 transactions isn't fixed. That's an opening rate. Third, who actually does the work? Find out whether there's a named accountant or a shared inbox. It matters more than you'd think.

Get the answers in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. Hesitation tells you plenty.

What to ask for

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. Include gateway payments if you're selling online. Don't use your peak month or your slowest, 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 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.