Bookkeeping Services Singapore Price: The Real Range
What does a Singapore accountant cost? Most SMEs pay S$150 to S$600 monthly. See singapore bookkeeping services what sets the price, what isn't included, and when hiring in-house wins.
Getting a straight price out of a Singapore accounting firm is weirdly hard. You'll hear "it depends on your requirements" and get pushed toward a discovery call. Not helpful when you're doing a simple cash flow projection.
Let's skip to what things actually cost. For the average Pte Ltd or sole proprietorship, the going rate is S$150 to S$600 a month at up to 300 transactions a month. 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. The vast majority of small businesses sit in the narrower range. Budget against that one.
What moves your number up or down
The common mistake is assuming the wrong variable. Your fee isn't set by revenue. It's driven by how many transactions run through your accounts.
Take two examples. 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, costs considerably more to handle. The smaller business pays more. A quote based purely on revenue is a placeholder, not a price. Make them count the lines.
The reason volume dominates is mechanical. Every transaction has to be recorded, categorised, and matched against your bank feed. 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. Those need a human to investigate. 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:
- 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.
- GST returns: usually S$80 to S$200 extra per return once you're registered.
- Clean-up: if your books are a year behind, someone has to rebuild them. It's a one-off project fee, not a monthly rate.
- Xero and copyright subscriptions: sometimes rebilled with a markup. Confirm the subscription is included.
- Reporting frequency: monthly management accounts cost more than annual statements alone. Only pay for the cadence you'll actually open.
- Group structures: 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 deserves its own explanation because the quotes look irrational. One firm says S$8 a head, another says S$80. They're often not describing the same work. Scope explains the gap.
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, and the employee adds 20 percent. Rates step down with age. 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.
There's also a wage ceiling to track. 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. Bonus payments hit the Additional Wage cap, and that's the common failure point. Easy to get wrong.
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. The CPF deadline is the 14th of the month after, and late payment attracts interest at 1.5 percent per month.
Before comparing payroll prices, establish scope. 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.
What your quote probably doesn't cover
In Singapore, "accounting" gets used to describe four separate regulated jobs, but just one is what you need every month. 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. Just that.
The other three are separate engagements. Corporate tax work is handled by a tax agent, not your bookkeeper. GST filing only matters once your taxable turnover crosses S$1 million, which is the point IRAS registration becomes compulsory. Statutory audit requires an ACRA-registered public accountant to sign.
Most small companies never need that audit. Exemption applies when you satisfy two of three criteria, 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 the financial year, and normally you need to have met the criteria across the two preceding financial years, though a company less than two years old is judged on the current year alone.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds. Audit is a distinct engagement carrying its own cost, frequently in the thousands, so knowing whether you're exempt changes your annual budget significantly. 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 after employer CPF contributions, leave, and the subscriptions. 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. 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 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 benefits from someone in the building. That's not the same as just getting bigger.
What a suspiciously cheap price usually means
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? An unannounced jump at a volume threshold isn't a fixed fee. It's a starting price. 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.
Get the answers in writing. A provider confident in their pricing will commit to it. If they stall, that's your answer.
How to get a real number
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. If they still won't commit to a number, that tells you something.
Counting your transaction volume takes ten minutes. 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 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.