If you run a small Singapore business — a café, a design studio, a five-person startup — payroll is something you do yourself, squeezed between everything else. There is no HR department. There is no budget for a S$200-a-month HR suite. And yet CPF still has to be filed every month, itemised payslips are legally required, and IRAS AIS comes around every March whether you are ready or not.
Most "best payroll software" lists are written for HR managers evaluating features at a mid-sized company. This one is for the owner or office manager of a small business who just needs payroll done correctly — cheaply, and without learning a platform built for a 200-person company.
First, do you actually need HR software?
Probably not the full thing. It helps to separate two very different products that often get sold together:
- An HRMS handles the whole employee lifecycle — recruitment, onboarding, performance reviews, scheduling, claims. Powerful, and priced accordingly.
- Payroll and compliance software handles the monthly money: gross-to-net pay, CPF/SDL/SHG, itemised payslips, CPF eZpay submission, IRAS AIS filing, and basic leave.
A small, founder-led team almost always needs the second, not the first. You can run recruitment through referrals, do performance reviews over coffee, and track the roster in a group chat. What you cannot skip is paying people correctly and filing with CPF and IRAS on time — and that is exactly the part software should take off your plate.
The rule of thumb: under about 20 employees, buy payroll and compliance. Add the broader HRMS later, when headcount makes those functions worth paying for.
What a Singapore small business must do, every cycle
Even a two-person company has the same statutory obligations as a large one. Each month you have to:
- Calculate CPF (employer and employee shares), plus SDL and any self-help group fund contributions — see current CPF contribution rates.
- Issue itemised payslips — a legal requirement under the Employment Act (what must be on them).
- Pay salaries, usually via a GIRO bulk payout file.
- Submit CPF through CPF eZpay by the 14th of the following month.
And once a year, you file IRAS AIS / IR8A for every employee. (Our full step-by-step on running a Singapore payroll cycle walks through all of it.)
None of this is optional, and none of it scales down just because you are small. The job of software is to make it take ten minutes instead of half a day — and to catch the errors (a missing FIN, an absent bank account, a wrong CPF Submission Number) before a file gets rejected.
The pricing trap: per-seat vs per-company
This is where small businesses quietly overpay. Many tools charge per employee per month. At S$4–6 a head, that is invisible at three people and painful at fifteen:
| Team size | Per-seat (S$5/head) | Flat per-company (AimmPayroll) |
|---|---|---|
| 3 employees | ~S$15/month | S$0 (Free tier) |
| 8 employees | ~S$40/month | S$9.90 (Starter) |
| 25 employees | ~S$125/month | S$29 (Growth) |
With flat per-company pricing, every hire you add within a tier costs nothing extra. For a growing small business on a tight budget, that difference compounds quickly.
Free and low-cost options in 2026
AimmPayroll Free — S$0/month, up to 3 employees. The full statutory cycle, not a crippled demo: CPF, SDL and SHG calculation, payslip PDFs, the CPF eZpay file and IRAS AIS export. Genuinely enough to run a micro-business end to end.
AimmPayroll Starter — S$9.90/month (about S$8 on annual billing), up to 10 employees. Adds the GIRO bulk payout file, leave management and employee self-service. This is the sweet spot for most small businesses past their third hire.
A note on the big HR suites. QuickHR, Payboy, JustLogin and BrioHR are capable platforms, but they are full HR suites aimed at HR managers, and most are quote-based — you have to talk to sales for a number. For a small business that just needs payroll filed, that is usually more tool, and more cost, than the job requires. If you want the detailed feature-by-feature breakdown, see our full comparison of Singapore payroll platforms and the Talenox alternative guide.
A note on spreadsheets. Plenty of small businesses still run payroll in Excel. It is free, but it has no CPF rate updates, no eZpay file, no audit trail, and every formula is a manual error waiting to happen at the worst time. The moment you have more than one or two staff, dedicated software pays for itself in avoided rework.
When you outgrow the free tier
The free plan is meant to be grown out of, not a dead end:
- 4th employee → Starter (S$9.90/month, up to 10).
- Need GIRO, leave, or self-service → Starter.
- Approaching 50 staff, want compliance checks + the AI co-pilot → Growth (S$29/month).
Your data carries over — upgrading is a plan change, not a migration.
Which option for which small business
| Your situation | Best fit |
|---|---|
| 1–3 employees, zero budget | AimmPayroll Free (S$0) |
| 4–10 employees, tight budget | AimmPayroll Starter (S$9.90/month) |
| Up to 50, want pre-run checks + AI help | AimmPayroll Growth (S$29/month) |
| Genuinely need recruitment / performance / scheduling | A broader HRMS — see the full comparison |
| Leaving Talenox after its free-plan removal | AimmPayroll Free or Starter |
The bottom line
A small Singapore business does not need expensive HR software. It needs payroll done right, cheaply, with CPF and IRAS handled correctly and on time — and the errors caught before they become an 11pm rejection.
If that is you, AimmPayroll Asia is built for exactly that job at small scale. You can start free for up to three employees with no card required, or see the full pricing before you decide.