BC Chart of Accounts for QuickBooks Online with GST + PST (Free)

QuickBooks Online hands a British Columbia company its full code set on day one, three tax combinations and three zeros, and then leaves the hard part to the bookkeeper: knowing which lines are goods and which are services, because in BC that single distinction moves 7% of every purchase between recoverable and gone. This chart of accounts moves that knowledge into the account defaults.

The BC code set, and what each means for money

• GST/PST BC (12%): goods, software, telecom, repairs to goods, legal services. On purchases, only the 5% GST returns as a credit; the 7% is cost.
• GST BC (5%): most services, commercial rent, resale inventory (thanks to the PST exemption), PST-exempt goods like food. Fully creditable.
• PST BC (7%): the standalone provincial code, mostly for self-assessed PST on goods brought into the province.
• Z, E, Out of scope: zero-rated (groceries, exports), exempt (bank fees, insurance, residential rent), and non-supplies (wages, permits, transfers), same as everywhere in Canada.

Defaults that encode the goods-versus-services line

The chart’s opinionated defaults do the daily thinking. Office supplies, computer equipment, signage-type goods: GST/PST BC, with the PST half priced in. Software subscriptions and telephone and internet: also GST/PST BC, because BC taxes software and telecom, a surprise to anyone arriving from Alberta. Legal and professional fees: GST BC default with the 12% alternative, since lawyers’ services carry PST but accountants’ do not. Cost of goods sold: GST BC, on the strength of the resale exemption, with the note telling purchasing to keep the PST number on file with suppliers. Meals and entertainment: GST BC, restaurant food being PST-exempt, with half the GST claimable federally.

Collections get their own plumbing too: a dedicated PST payable liability account, because what you collect from BC customers on taxable sales remits to the province on its own return, on its own schedule, entirely apart from the GST cycle.

Setup order

1. Enable sales tax; QuickBooks provisions the whole BC set automatically.
2. Import the chart under Settings, Import data, Chart of accounts (structure only; QuickBooks codes at the line).
3. Adopt the readable CSV as the coding sheet. Its notes reduce BC’s goods-versus-services doctrine to one line per account.
4. Reconcile GST to the CRA return and PST payable to the provincial return, each period, separately.

Where BC files drift

Three patterns account for most cleanup work. Services coded at 12%, quietly overstating costs and understating nothing (the PST was never charged, so the books invent it). Goods coded at 5%, missing real PST that was on the invoice and understating the true cost. And resale inventory coded at 12% because nobody gave the supplier the PST number, which is not a coding error at all but a purchasing one, fixed upstream. A monthly skim of the big expense accounts against their default codes catches all three while they are cheap.

Keep the paper that proves the exemptions. BC administers PST with its own audit program, and the documents that end those conversations quickly are the ones this workflow produces naturally: resale exemption details on file with suppliers, invoices showing which tax was charged, and a PST payable account that reconciles to every provincial filing. Six years of retention applies federally regardless, so the archive does double duty.

The judgment lives on every line, at entry speed. Dext anchors recurring vendors with rules. ExpenseFlow reads each bill, applies the goods-or-services call and the resale exemption correctly, keeps 12% and 5% lines apart on mixed invoices, and posts coded entries into QuickBooks against this chart. Hubdoc files the source documents behind it all.

On Xero instead? That version, including the custom rates BC needs there, is at BC chart of accounts for Xero. The code definitions live in the BC QuickBooks sales tax reference.