What Small Business Accounting Costs You in Singapore
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.
Most Singapore accounting quotes arrive as "it depends," which helps nobody. Everyone wants a call before they'll say a number. 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 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. The vast majority of small businesses sit in the narrower range. That's the number to plan around.
What actually drives the price
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.
Picture two companies. An agency turning over S$800,000 on twelve annual invoices has almost nothing to reconcile. An e-commerce store doing S$200,000 across 900 small orders, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, is far more work. The one with less revenue pays the bigger fee. Any firm quoting you off turnover alone hasn't looked at your books. Make them count the lines.
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. an unmatched payment, a duplicated charge, a late refund, a vendor who renamed their entity. 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.
A handful of extras change the total:
- Payroll: charged per employee per month, with enormous variation between firms, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask.
- Quarterly GST: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing if your business is GST-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.
- Software licences: occasionally passed on with a margin attached. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in.
- How often you want reports: asking for monthly numbers costs more than a once-a-year close. Decide whether you actually read them before paying for them.
- More than one company: every entity carries a separate set of accounts, so the second entity costs close to a full second fee.
Why payroll pricing varies so wildly
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. Different scope entirely.
The cheap end is usually salary computation and a payslip. The expensive end includes statutory submissions, and in Singapore that means CPF. 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 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. 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, at 0.25 percent of gross wages, capped between roughly S$10 and S$17 per employee monthly. 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. Paying more for correct statutory submissions can beat paying less and doing the filings yourself.
What your quote probably doesn't cover
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.
Monthly bookkeeping is the first, 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 fee we've been discussing. That part alone.
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, 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. 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. You also need to be a private company throughout accounting services for small business cost 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 knowing whether you're exempt changes your annual budget significantly. Find out where you sit.
Is a full-time hire cheaper
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 once you add employer CPF, annual leave, and software. 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. 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.
Outsourcing is cheaper for the majority of SMEs. The tipping point arrives further out than most expect, 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 justifies someone on site. 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, 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 actually does the work? Ask whether you get a named contact who knows your business or a rotating queue. The difference shows up fast.
Put all of it in writing. Firms comfortable with their fees will document them. Hesitation tells you plenty.
What to ask for
Give any firm these three things and they can quote you properly, no consultation needed. Your average monthly transaction count, your headcount, and whether you're GST-registered. 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. Open your business copyright for a normal month and count the lines. Add your payment gateway transactions if you sell 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.
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.