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.
Getting a straight price out of a Singapore accounting firm is weirdly hard. Everyone wants a call before they'll say a number. That's frustrating when you're just trying to build a budget.
Let's skip to what things actually cost. For most Singapore small businesses, the going rate is S$150 to S$600 a month for light to moderate transaction volumes. 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. But most owners reading this will land in that S$150 to S$600 band. Budget against that one.
Why quotes differ so much
This is where most people misjudge it. the price isn't keyed to turnover. It's driven by how many transactions run through your accounts.
Picture two companies. A consultancy billing S$800,000 a year across twelve invoices has almost nothing to reconcile. A Shopify shop doing S$200,000 through 900 tiny transactions, with payment gateway fees, refunds and chargebacks, costs considerably more to handle. The smaller business pays more. Any firm quoting you off turnover alone hasn't looked at your books. Volume, not revenue.
It's worth understanding why volume matters so much. Every transaction has to be recorded, categorised, and matched against your bank feed. A tidy transaction takes seconds. 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. Scale the transactions and you scale the exceptions with them, it has thirty times the opportunities for something to go wrong.
Some other factors move the price too:
- Staff payroll: charged per employee per month, and the spread between providers is huge, anywhere from single digits to S$30 or S$80 per person.
- Quarterly GST: typically another S$80 to S$200 per filing if your business is GST-registered.
- Clean-up: 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. 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: each company needs its own books and its own filings, so two companies rarely cost the same as one and a half.
What payroll really adds to the bill
Payroll deserves its own explanation because the quotes look irrational. Quotes range from single digits to S$80 per employee. They're often not describing the same work. Scope explains the gap.
The cheap end is usually salary computation 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, and the employee adds 20 percent. 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.
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. 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.
Then there's the Skills Development Levy, 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.
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.
Why two quotes are rarely comparable
The word "accounting" covers four distinct functions here, and only one of them is the monthly work. This is why a S$1,200 quote and a S$250 quote can both be honest.
The recurring monthly piece is bookkeeping, 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. And statutory audit can only be signed off by an ACRA-registered public accountant.
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. You how much does a good accountant cost also need to be a private company throughout the financial year, and ordinarily you'd meet the tests in the two prior years, though newly incorporated companies under two years old are assessed on the current year.
That exemption matters more than most owners realise. 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.
Outsourcing versus hiring someone
This one's less close than people expect. Hiring in-house runs somewhere between S$62,000 and S$87,000 annually after employer CPF contributions, leave, and the subscriptions. Compare that to roughly S$7,200 a year at the upper end of the outsourced range.
Salary is the headline, not the total. 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. A firm has cover. Nobody prices that in.
For most small businesses, outsourcing wins comfortably. The tipping point arrives further out than most expect, usually when transaction volume, headcount and reporting demands justify a dedicated person. Before that, you're funding idle capacity.
The honest exception is complexity, not size. Multi-warehouse inventory, multi-currency exposure, and decisions that copyright on same-day figures benefits from someone in the building. 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 concern is a price that's low because something's been left out.
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 happens when your volume grows? A fee that jumps without warning at 40 transactions isn't fixed. 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. 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.
How to get a real number
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. That's enough for a firm to give you a fixed figure quickly. 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. Add your payment gateway transactions if you sell online. Avoid picking your busiest month or your quietest, 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 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.