Alberta Agency + Consultancy Chart of Accounts for Xero (Free)

An agency’s tax life in Alberta is mostly other people’s taxes: the client’s province on the invoice you send, the contractor’s registration status on the invoice you receive, and the platform’s billing country on the subscription in between. This Xero chart of accounts turns each of those judgments into an account default with the exceptions spelled out.

Buying people

Freelancer and contractor costs defaults to AB - GST on Purchases for registered contractors, whose 5% flows straight back as a credit, with the custom Out of Scope rate listed for legitimate small suppliers. The account note carries the operating rule: registration status is data you collect at onboarding, and revisit when a regular contractor’s billing obviously outgrows the threshold.

Pass-through media and ad spend keeps client-billed platform money out of your own marketing account. Margin reporting wants it separate; so does tax, because whether Google’s or Meta’s billing entity charges creditable GST or unclaimable simplified-regime tax is a per-vendor fact you want visible per campaign.

Selling time

Services income defaults to AB - GST on Sales and immediately concedes the default is provincial: place-of-supply for location-independent services follows the client, so Ontario retainers carry 13%, BC ones BC’s treatment, and export clients are typically zero-rated. Every needed rate is already seeded in Xero’s Canadian edition; the alternatives column on this account is effectively your client map.

The small print accounts

• Professional liability insurance: exempt, and in Alberta the premium carries no provincial tax rider at all.
• Professional dues and memberships: 5% with a full credit for professional bodies; recreational club dues never earn an ITC and live in the base chart’s club account.
• Home office costs: Out of Scope; the workspace claim is income tax arithmetic, not a coded supply.
• Meals and entertainment: pitch lunches carry the 50% ITC limitation, flagged on the account.
• Software subscriptions: 5% domestic default, simplified-regime warning attached.

Retainers set the tax clock

Agencies love retainers and deposits, and GST has an opinion about them: the tax point generally lands at the earlier of invoicing and payment, not at delivery of the work. A January retainer invoice for work running through March carries its 5% (or the client-province rate) in January. Park retainer balances visibly, either as deferred revenue or through clear invoice descriptions, so the month’s tax collected reconciles to the month’s invoices rather than to the month’s effort. Work-in-progress is a management number; the GST return runs on invoice dates.

From download to working books

1. Create the three custom 0% rates (Tax menu, Tax settings, Tax rates).
2. Import via Accounting, Chart of accounts, Import.
3. Fold the readable CSV into client-facing onboarding docs; its notes are the whole induction for a new bookkeeper.
4. Quarterly, reconcile the contractor account against registration statuses and the platform accounts against who is charging what.

Rebilled costs deserve a deliberate posture: expenses re-invoiced as part of your service normally take your service’s tax treatment on the rebill, while true pass-through disbursements behave differently, and one conversation with your accountant fixes the policy permanently. Keeping rebills on distinct invoice lines makes the policy executable.

Growth changes the numbers in this chart but rarely the shape. A second studio, a specialty practice, or a white-label arm all fit as tracking categories over the same accounts, which keeps year-on-year comparisons meaningful instead of resetting them with every reorganization.

The document stream of an agency is high-frequency and low-drama, which is exactly where coding decays. Hubdoc captures and files everything. ExpenseFlow reads each invoice, applies the registration-aware contractor logic and client-province rates from this chart, and posts coded entries into Xero. Dext pins the recurring vendors with supplier rules.

The QuickBooks rendering of this chart is at Alberta agency chart of accounts for QuickBooks; the rate reference is the Alberta Xero tax rates list.