If you are looking for an audit firm in Singapore, the useful first question is not which firm — it is whether your company is required to have an audit at all. A significant number of companies that engage an auditor did not need one.
When an audit is required
Singapore exempts private companies that qualify as small companies. The test looks at revenue, total assets and employee numbers, and it is applied across the two immediately preceding financial years rather than to a single year. A company inside a group is assessed on the group as well as on itself, which is the step most companies get wrong.
ACRA sets and publishes these criteria. We check your position against them rather than working from memory, and ACRA opened a review of the framework in February 2026.
Even where the exemption applies, an audit may still be required by a bank facility, a shareholder agreement, a grant body, a landlord, or a parent company’s group auditor.
What an audit actually produces
An opinion on whether the financial statements give a true and fair view. Not a guarantee that nothing is wrong, and not an inspection of every transaction — an audit is designed to give reasonable assurance that the statements are free from material misstatement.
The distinction matters when choosing a firm. A firm promising to find every error is describing something an audit is not.
What to ask a firm before engaging them
- Who signs the opinion, and will you deal with them? Partner involvement varies considerably between firms.
- What does the document request look like? One consolidated request is very different to work with from a trickle of separate ones.
- What drives the fee? Entity count, the condition of the records and your deadline. A firm that quotes without asking about those is guessing.
- Can they also do your accounting? They cannot — not for the same company. A firm that says yes to both is telling you something about how it treats independence.
On independence
An auditor cannot audit accounts their own firm prepared. Certain other combinations of services raise the same question, and they need settling before an engagement starts rather than after.
Where a combination is not available to you, the right answer is to be told so at the outset. We would rather lose the second engagement than take on a position we cannot hold.
Timing
For an SME with orderly records, fieldwork is a matter of weeks. The timeline depends far more on how quickly the document request is answered than on the size of the company. If your records are behind, that work has to happen first — and if we are auditing you, someone other than us has to do it.