Accounting Services Fees Singapore: A Detailed Breakdown

Bookkeeping Services Singapore Price: The Real Range 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. The standard reply is a request for a consultation, not a figure. Which is useless if you're only trying to forecast next year's costs. So let's put actual numbers down. For the average Pte Ltd or sole proprietorship, expect to pay S$150 to S$600 a month at up to 300 transactions a month. 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. What moves your number up or down The common mistake is assuming the wrong variable. it's not about how much money you make. What matters is the number of lines your accountant has to touch. Consider two businesses. An agency turning over S$800,000 on twelve annual invoices takes very little work. A Shopify shop doing S$200,000 through 900 tiny transactions, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, is far more work. The one with less revenue pays the bigger fee. A quote based purely on revenue is a placeholder, not a price. Volume, not revenue. It's worth understanding why volume matters so much. Every transaction has to be recorded, categorised, and matched against your bank feed. Most of that is fast when the data is clean. 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. Manually. Scale the transactions and you scale the exceptions with them, and exceptions are where the hours go. Some other factors move the price too: Staff payroll: billed per head monthly, with enormous variation between firms, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask. GST returns: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing if your business is GST-registered. Catch-up work: 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. 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. 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 pricing confuses people, and the reason is scope. One firm says S$8 a head, another says S$80. 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 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 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. Additional Wage is capped yearly at S$102,000 less whatever Ordinary Wage has already absorbed. Bonus payments hit the Additional Wage cap, and that's the common failure point. Easy to get wrong. SDL sits on top of that, charged at 0.25 percent of gross wages with a monthly cap in the S$10 to S$17 range. 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. Monthly bookkeeping is the first, covering reconciling accountant cost 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. Nothing else. Three more get billed apart. Corporate tax work is handled by a tax agent, not your bookkeeper. GST filing only matters once your taxable turnover crosses S$1 million, the threshold that triggers mandatory IRAS registration. And statutory audit can only be signed off by an ACRA-registered public accountant. Most small companies never need that audit. 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. 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 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 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. Add 17 percent employer CPF for anyone under 55, then annual leave, medical coverage, a desk, and the accounting software licence. And there's a risk that rarely appears in the comparison: 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, 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. 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 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 can price below the market through efficiency alone. The concern is a price that's low because something's been left out. Check these three things. 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? An unannounced jump at a volume threshold isn't a fixed fee. It's a starting price. Third, who's doing the work? Ask whether you get a named contact who knows your business or a rotating queue. The difference shows up fast. Get the answers 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 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, including what happens if your volume grows. 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.