Frequently asked questions

Quite the opposite — small firms are exactly who we’re built for. The whole idea of an HR retainer is to give a 10- to 75-person company senior HR judgement, minus the salary of a full-time HR manager. You can start as light as on-call advice plus keeping your contracts and handbook right, and lean on us more only as you grow. Many of our clients never need to build a full HR team because the retainer covers the senior thinking.

Both, and you choose. One-off work — a compliance audit, a handbook build, a specific hire, a batch of pass applications — is quoted as a fixed-fee project agreed before we start. Ongoing support is a monthly retainer, sized to your headcount and how much you lean on us, from about $500 a month for a small team. Every engagement is scoped and the fee settled in writing before we begin, so nothing arrives as an open-ended hourly bill.

Yes. We process salaries, allowances, overtime and bonuses, calculate CPF correctly for citizens, PRs and the various pass holders, issue itemised payslips on time, and handle the statutory side — year-end IR8A and Appendix 8A, and IR21 tax clearance when a foreign employee leaves. Salary data is handled under PDPA-aware controls, and we can disburse via PayNow or a bank file. It scales as your headcount grows, with no need to hire a payroll executive.

COMPASS is the points framework the Ministry of Manpower uses to assess most new Employment Pass applications, scoring factors like salary, qualifications, the firm’s nationality diversity and its share of local employees. It absolutely affects approvals. We run a COMPASS pre-assessment before you commit to a hire, so you can see how an application is likely to score and what to adjust to strengthen it — rather than finding out the hard way after a rejection.

Keeping current with the Employment Act, MOM and tripartite guidelines, the work-pass frameworks and PDPA is core to what we do — our consultants average eighteen years in Singapore HR. We make sure your contracts, records, payroll treatment and pass conditions stay aligned as those rules change, including newer developments like workplace-fairness and fair-consideration expectations, so you stay ahead of them rather than reacting after something goes wrong.

We do the work. Advisory is part of it — being the senior voice you call before a decision — but we also run payroll, prepare and lodge pass applications, source and screen candidates, draft contracts and handbooks, fix compliance gaps and deliver training. You’re not buying a report that tells you what to do and then leaves you to do it; you’re buying a team that handles it, with a named consultant accountable for the outcome.

You get a named consultant who owns your account and learns your business, supported by specialists for payroll, immigration or recruitment when a piece of work calls for it. The point is continuity — someone who already understands your firm when something urgent lands, rather than a ticket queue where you re-explain yourself to a different junior every time you call.

Yes, and this is often when clients are glad they have us. We help you respond to MOM queries properly, prepare for a Tripartite Alliance for Dispute Management claim, and manage grievances, disciplinary matters and exits fairly and within the law. If your foundations are in order — which we’ll have helped put right — these situations are far less stressful and far more likely to resolve in your favour.

All employee and salary records are handled in line with the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) here, with access kept tight and shared only with the consultants assigned to your account. It is used purely to deliver the HR services you’ve engaged us for — never to market to your staff, and never handed to any third party. Payroll is disbursed through secure channels such as PayNow or a protected bank file.