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.

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. That's frustrating when you're just trying to build a budget.

Here are the real figures. For the average Pte Ltd or sole proprietorship, expect to pay 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. The vast majority of small businesses sit in the narrower range. Plan on it.

What actually drives the price

Here's the thing most owners get wrong. the price isn't keyed to turnover. 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 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. Revenue tells you nothing here. A quote based purely on revenue is a placeholder, not a price. Ask them to count instead.

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 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, and exceptions are where the hours go.

Beyond volume, a few things push the number up:

• 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: usually S$80 to S$200 extra per return once you're registered.
• Catch-up work: if your books are a year behind, someone has to rebuild them. Expect a separate one-time charge, which is fair, but get it quoted on its own.
• Accounting software: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. Confirm the subscription is included.
• Reporting frequency: asking for monthly numbers costs more than a once-a-year close. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them.
• Multiple entities: every entity carries a separate set of accounts, so the second entity costs close to a full second fee.

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 often not describing the same work. Scope explains the gap.

At the low end you're getting a calculation and a payslip. The higher price includes the statutory filings, and in Singapore that means CPF. For staff below 55, the employer contributes 17 percent, and the employee adds 20 percent. The rates taper as employees get older. 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 changed what employers owe on higher salaries. 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, 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.

Why two quotes are rarely comparable

In Singapore, "accounting" gets used to describe four separate regulated jobs, 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 bank reconciliation, accounts payable and receivable, payroll with CPF submissions, and SFRS-compliant year-end statements. That's the number in the range above. Just that.

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, the threshold that triggers mandatory IRAS registration. 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 accounting fees employees. You also need to be a private company throughout the financial year, 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. 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. 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 leave entitlement, medical benefits, workspace, and software. There's also the risk nobody prices in: when a single in-house accountant leaves, the function stops with them. An outsourced provider has continuity built in. That's a real risk.

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. 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 benefits 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 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, does the fee include year-end financial statements, or just monthly bookkeeping? Plenty of cheap quotes stop at the monthly reconciliation and bill separately for the annual close. 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. The difference shows up fast.

Put all of it in writing. A provider confident in their pricing will commit to it. If they stall, that's your answer.

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. A firm that still won't quote is telling 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, 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 fee you can budget around is worth more than a cheap hourly rate that drifts. Predictability is what you're actually buying, not the smallest figure you can find.

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