What Small Business Accounting Costs You in Singapore

Real Singapore accounting fees: S$150 to S$600 a month for most small firms. Learn what moves your quote, what's billed separately, and how to compare.

Ask three Singapore firms what they charge and you'll get three non-answers. 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.

Here are the real figures. For a typical SME here, monthly accounting and bookkeeping runs S$150 to S$600 a month for light to moderate transaction volumes. 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. But most owners reading this will land in that S$150 to S$600 band. That's the number to plan around.

What actually drives the price

Here's the thing most owners get wrong. it's not about how much money you make. What matters is the number of lines your accountant has to touch.

Picture two companies. 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, complete with gateway fees, returns and disputes, 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.

The reason volume dominates is mechanical. Every transaction has to be recorded, categorised, and matched against your bank feed. A tidy transaction takes seconds. 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. Those need a human to investigate. Manually. A business with 900 transactions doesn't just have thirty times the data of one with 30, and exceptions are where the hours go.

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 returns: usually S$80 to S$200 extra per return if your business is GST-registered.
• Backlog reconstruction: 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.
• Software licences: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in.
• Reporting frequency: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them.
• Group structures: every entity carries a separate set of accounts, 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 usually describing different jobs. 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. Rates step down with age. 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. 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. Bonus payments hit the Additional Wage cap, and that's the common failure point. Worth double-checking.

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.

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 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 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. You qualify for the small company exemption if you meet two of three tests, 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. The company must be private for the whole financial year too, and normally you need to have met the criteria across the two accountant monthly fee 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 knowing whether you're exempt changes your annual budget significantly. Check which side you're on.

In-house or outsourced

This one's less close than people expect. Hiring in-house runs somewhere between S$62,000 and S$87,000 annually 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 band.

The salary itself is only part of it. 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. An outsourced provider has continuity built in. One person is a single point of failure.

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 not the same as just getting bigger.

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 problem is when the low price reflects missing scope rather than better process.

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? A fee that jumps without warning at 40 transactions isn't fixed. That's an opening rate. 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.

Get the answers in writing. A provider confident in their pricing will commit to it. If they stall, that's your answer.

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. 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. 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. 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.