Updated: 14 Aug 2026
Ask three accounting firms in Singapore for a quote and you'll get three numbers that look nothing like each other. One quotes S$100 a month. One quotes S$1,400 a year. One says it depends and asks how many invoices you issue.
They're all answering a slightly different question, which is why the numbers don't line up. Accounting in Singapore is really two separate services that get sold under one word, and until you separate them, no quote is comparable to any other.
Here's what each piece actually costs in 2026, and what makes your number land where it does.
The 2 Services Behind Every Accounting Quote
Accounting services in Singapore split into ongoing work and year-end work, and they're priced completely differently.
Ongoing accounting is your bookkeeping through the year: recording invoices, reconciling bank statements, tracking GST, and keeping the ledger current. It's billed monthly, quarterly, or weekly.
Year-end accounting is the statutory package every Singapore company has to produce regardless of activity: accounts preparation, financial statements, tax computation, and the Form C or C-S filing to IRAS. It's billed once per financial year.
A dormant company needs only the second. A GST-registered company with staff and daily transactions needs both. That single distinction explains most of the spread you see in quotes.
Typical Accounting Costs in Singapore in 2026
Across providers that publish their rates, here's roughly where the market sits.
| Service | Typical Range (SGD) | Billed |
|---|---|---|
| Bookkeeping, small non-GST company | 90 to 200 per month | Monthly |
| Bookkeeping, GST-registered SME | 200 to 500 per month | Monthly |
| Bookkeeping, high-volume business | 500 to 800+ per month | Monthly |
| Year-end accounts, dormant company | 400 to 600 | Annually |
| Year-end accounts, small active company | 1,100 to 1,700 | Annually |
| Year-end accounts, mid-volume company | 2,000 to 3,500 | Annually |
| XBRL filing | 300 to 500 | Per filing |
| Statutory audit (if required) | 3,000 upward | Annually |
For context on how granular this can get, our own accounting pricing table publishes every tier by exact transaction bracket, from dormant companies at S$500 for the full year-end package up to five-figure engagements for businesses running thousands of transactions. Year-end for a company with 1 to 20 annual transactions comes to S$1,150 all in. At 51 to 100 transactions it's S$1,700. Ongoing bookkeeping runs from S$150 a month at 1 to 10 transactions to S$600 at 51 to 100.
Most quotes in Singapore are built on a similar logic even when the provider doesn't publish the table.
What Actually Drives Your Accounting Fee
Revenue is the metric business owners expect to be priced on, and it's usually the wrong one. A consultancy billing S$2 million across twelve invoices a year is cheaper to account for than a cafe turning over S$400,000 across nine thousand small transactions.
Transaction Volume
This is the primary driver almost everywhere. A transaction is any individual financial entry that has to be recorded: a sales invoice, a supplier bill, a payment out, a receipt in, a bank transfer, an expense claim. Count roughly how many your business generates in a month and you'll be able to place yourself on any provider's tier table within a bracket or two.
GST Registration
Once you cross the S$1 million annual taxable turnover threshold, GST registration becomes compulsory, and quarterly GST returns become part of your accountant's job. That work is real and it's recurring, which is why GST-registered companies sit in a higher band than similar-sized companies that aren't registered.
The State of Your Records
This is the variable most business owners underestimate. A year of clean records handed over in a cloud accounting file costs a fraction of a shoebox of receipts and an incomplete bank feed. Clean-up and reconstruction work is normally scoped and quoted separately from the standard engagement, and it can easily cost more than the accounting itself.
The single biggest driver of a fee coming in above expectations, in our experience, is a company arriving in month ten of its financial year with nothing reconciled. At that point the work isn't bookkeeping, it's reconstruction, and it has to be done before anything else can start. Companies that move onto a cloud accounting system early almost never end up in that position, because the bank feed does most of the work as the year goes along.
Complexity of Structure
Straightforward single-entity companies with standard accounting treatment sit at base rates. Related-party transactions, intercompany dealings, or non-standard treatment typically add around 30 percent. Group structures, significant judgement calls, or audit-level scrutiny can add around 60 percent. Any provider adding a complexity loading should tell you before the work starts, not on the invoice.
The Costs That Don't Appear in the Headline Quote
Most disputes about accounting fees in Singapore come down to scope rather than price. These are the items most commonly billed on top.
XBRL filing is required by ACRA for companies that don't qualify as small, meaning those failing to meet at least two of three criteria: revenue under S$10 million, total assets under S$10 million, and fewer than 50 employees. Where it applies, XBRL filing usually runs S$300 for a simplified filing or S$500 for a full one.
Corporate tax work is sometimes bundled and sometimes not. The Form C-S or Form C filing to IRAS, the tax computation, and the Estimated Chargeable Income submission are separate deliverables, and a bookkeeping-only quote won't include them. Our corporate tax services cover that end of the calendar, which matters because the November filing deadline sits well after most companies have closed their books.
Statutory audit is a different service entirely. Most Singapore SMEs are audit-exempt under the small company criteria, but if your company doesn't qualify, a statutory audit is an additional engagement with its own fee, typically starting in the low thousands.
Payroll, CPF submissions, and software subscriptions are also usually separate. Some providers include a Xero or QuickBooks licence in higher tiers, some bill it through, some expect you to hold your own.
In-House Accountant or Outsourced Accounting
For most Singapore SMEs, outsourcing wins on cost until headcount and transaction volume get high enough to justify a salary.
Jobstreet puts the average accountant salary in Singapore at around S$4,200 to S$5,100 a month. Add CPF, leave, training, software, and the cost of covering the role when that person resigns, and a full-time hire realistically lands somewhere near S$60,000 to S$75,000 a year.
An outsourced arrangement for a typical SME lands between roughly S$2,000 and S$10,000 a year depending on volume. The crossover point usually arrives when transaction volume passes a few hundred a month, or when the business needs someone in the building for management reporting and cash flow decisions rather than compliance filings.
Plenty of companies end up running a hybrid: an internal finance person handling day-to-day entries in a cloud accounting system, with an external firm handling year-end accounts, tax, and statutory filings.
Getting a Quote You Can Actually Compare at Margin Wheeler!
Before you ask anyone for a price, work out three numbers: your average monthly transaction count, whether you're GST-registered, and how clean your current records are. With those three, any published tier table will put you within a fairly narrow range in about a minute.
Then ask every provider the same question, which is what a full year costs, not what the monthly figure is. A S$100 monthly quote that excludes year-end accounts, tax computation, Form C-S, and XBRL will often total more over twelve months than a S$150 quote that covers all four.
If you want to see exactly where your business lands rather than working off a range, our accounting pricing guide sets out every bracket for both ongoing bookkeeping and year-end work, and our accounting team can tell you which complexity tier applies to your structure before you commit to anything.