Bookkeeping Services Singapore Price: The Real Range
Singapore accounting fees run S$150 to S$600 a month for most SMEs. Here's what drives your quote, what's excluded, and how outsourcing compares to hiring.
Try asking a Singapore accounting firm for a number and watch the subject change. 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.
Let's skip to what things actually cost. For a typical SME here, 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. Budget against that one.
Why quotes differ so much
This is where most people misjudge it. it's not about how much money you make. What matters is the number of lines your accountant has to touch.
Take two examples. An agency turning over S$800,000 on twelve annual invoices has almost nothing to reconcile. A Shopify shop doing S$200,000 through 900 tiny transactions, complete with gateway fees, returns and disputes, is far more work. Revenue tells you nothing here. A quote based purely on revenue is a placeholder, not a price. Make them count the lines.
It's worth understanding why volume matters so much. Each line needs recording, categorising, and reconciling to the copyright. Most of that is fast when the data is clean. 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.
Beyond volume, a few things push the number up:
- Staff 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: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing if your business is GST-registered.
- Backlog reconstruction: 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.
- Software licences: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Confirm the subscription is included.
- Reporting frequency: 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.
Understanding the payroll line
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. 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. For staff below 55, the employer contributes 17 percent, with the employee contributing 20 percent on top. 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. One misclassified employee means an amended filing.
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. Bonuses fall under that second ceiling, which is where most calculation errors happen. Worth double-checking.
SDL sits on top of that, 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, with 1.5 percent monthly interest on anything overdue.
Before comparing payroll prices, establish scope. Paying more for correct statutory submissions can beat paying less and doing the filings yourself.
What your quote probably doesn't cover
The word "accounting" covers four distinct functions here, but just one bookkeeping rates is what you need every month. 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. 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 filing only matters once your taxable turnover crosses 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. 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 a company less than two years old is judged on the current year alone.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds. An audit is a separate professional engagement with its own fee, often several thousand dollars, so your exemption status materially changes what you'll spend each year. Find out where you sit.
Outsourcing versus hiring someone
This one's less close than people expect. A full-time accountant in Singapore costs 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. Employer CPF adds 17 percent for staff below 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.
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. Before that, you're funding idle capacity.
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 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 happens when your volume grows? 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. The difference shows up fast.
Put all of it in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. If they stall, that's your answer.
What to ask for
Give any firm these three things and they can quote you properly, no consultation needed. monthly transaction volume, number of employees, and your GST registration status. Any competent provider can price that in a day. 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. Don't use your peak month or your slowest, since an atypical month produces a quote that changes on you. Pick a boring month.
Insist on a written fixed fee up front, including what happens if your volume grows. 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.