Singapore Accountant Fees: What Really Drives Your Quote
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 a typical SME here, 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, from about S$80 a month at the very light end to S$2,000 or more for complex operations. But most owners reading this will land in that S$150 to S$600 band. That's the number to plan around.
What moves your number up or down
The common mistake is assuming the wrong variable. the price isn't keyed to turnover. It's driven by how many transactions run through your accounts.
Consider two businesses. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve 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, 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. an unmatched payment, a duplicated charge, a late refund, a vendor who renamed their entity. Those need a human to investigate. One at a time. A business with 900 transactions doesn't just have thirty times the data of one with 30, and exceptions are where the hours go.
A handful of extras change the total:
- Payroll processing: charged per employee per month, 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 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: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. Confirm the subscription is included.
- How often you want reports: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Only pay for the cadence you'll actually open.
- Group structures: each company needs its own books and its own filings, so the second entity costs close to a full second fee.
Why payroll pricing varies so wildly
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. Different scope entirely.
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. 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 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. Worth double-checking.
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, with 1.5 percent monthly interest on anything overdue.
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.
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. Just that.
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.
Most small companies never need that audit. You qualify for the small company exemption if you meet two of three tests, 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 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.
That exemption matters more than most owners realise. Audit is a distinct engagement carrying its own cost, often several thousand dollars, so your exemption status materially changes what you'll spend each year. Find out where you sit.
Is a full-time hire cheaper
This one's less close than people expect. A full-time accountant in Singapore costs S$62,000 to S$87,000 a year once you add employer CPF, annual leave, and software. Set that against S$600 a month, or S$7,200 a year, at the top of the outsourced SME bookkeeping fees band.
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: if your only accountant resigns, your books stop. A firm has cover. That's a real risk.
Outsourcing is cheaper for the majority of SMEs. The tipping point arrives further out than most expect, usually when transaction volume, headcount and reporting demands justify a dedicated person. Before that, you're funding idle capacity.
The honest exception is complexity, not size. 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.
Warning signs in a quote
A very low quote isn't automatically a bad deal, but it's worth interrogating. 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.
Check these three things. First, are year-end statements included or is this monthly work only? Plenty of cheap quotes stop at the monthly reconciliation and bill separately for the annual close. 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? Find out whether there's a named accountant or a shared inbox. It matters more than you'd think.
Put all of it in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. Hesitation tells you plenty.
Getting an actual quote
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. 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, because a quote built on an unrepresentative month will get revised later. 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. That's the whole game with accounting fees: predictability, not the lowest number on the page.