Bookkeeping Services Singapore Price: The Real Range
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. 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 most Singapore small businesses, 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, 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. Budget against that one.
Why quotes differ so much
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. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve 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, costs considerably more to handle. Revenue tells you nothing here. Any firm quoting you off turnover alone hasn't looked at your books. Volume, not revenue.
The reason volume dominates is mechanical. Each line needs recording, categorising, and reconciling to the copyright. 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. By hand. Scale the transactions and you scale the exceptions with them, it has thirty times the opportunities for something to go wrong.
Beyond volume, a few things push the number up:
- Staff payroll: charged per employee per month, and the spread between providers is huge, from under S$10 to S$80 per employee depending who you ask.
- Quarterly GST: usually S$80 to S$200 extra per return 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.
- Accounting software: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Ask whether your monthly fee is all-in.
- Management reporting: 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 accounting services singapore price confuses people, and the reason is scope. One firm says S$8 a head, another says S$80. They're often not describing the same work. Same word, different job.
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 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.
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 shifted the numbers for better-paid staff. 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. Check that one twice.
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. 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
The word "accounting" covers four distinct functions here, 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 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. That part alone.
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. And statutory audit can only be signed off by an ACRA-registered public accountant.
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 employees. You also need to be a private company throughout the financial year, and normally you need to have met the criteria across the two preceding financial 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, frequently in the thousands, so your exemption status materially changes what you'll spend each year. Find out where you sit.
Is a full-time hire cheaper
The math here is one-sided for smaller firms. Hiring in-house runs 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.
Salary is the headline, not the total. Add 17 percent employer CPF for anyone under 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. 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. Until then, you're paying a salary for capacity you aren't using.
Where in-house wins is complexity. Multi-warehouse inventory, multi-currency exposure, and decisions that copyright on same-day figures justifies someone on site. 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 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, does the fee include year-end financial statements, or just monthly bookkeeping? 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? Ask whether you get a named contact who knows your business or a rotating queue. It matters more than you'd think.
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
Skip the discovery call theatre and hand over three things. 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 transactions is easier than it sounds. Open your business copyright for a normal month and count the lines. 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.
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. That's the whole game with accounting fees: predictability, not the lowest number on the page.