Alberta Ecommerce Chart of Accounts for QuickBooks Online (Free)

Run a storefront from Alberta and your bookkeeping speaks every Canadian tax dialect except your own province’s PST, which does not exist. Orders out the door take the destination’s rate, containers in take border GST, and the fee stack bills from two countries. This QuickBooks Online chart of accounts is arranged so each of those flows codes itself correctly by default.

Sales: destination writes the code

Online marketplace sales anchors at GST for Alberta and territory deliveries and expects company: HST ON for Ontario parcels, the BC and Quebec sets, Atlantic HST codes, Z for exports. Enable each from QuickBooks’ built-in provincial list at first use. The keep-honest routine is monthly: your platform’s tax summary against the code mix QuickBooks shows on this account. Any drift means the connector and the storefront disagree about somebody’s postal code.

Stock: two flows, two accounts

Cost of goods sold carries the domestic flow: Canadian suppliers at 5% with full credits, Z where the goods themselves are zero-rated. Inbound freight and import charges carries the international flow at Out of scope, because the claimable GST on imports belongs to the customs entry, not the vendor invoice. Duty never enters the tax system; international freight legs are zero-rated; and the broker statement filed with each entry is the audit trail for the ITC.

The fee stack, sorted once

• Marketplace and selling fees: GST when billed from a Canadian entity, with the simplified-regime caution for foreign billing and the registration-number fix in the note.
• Payment processing fees: E, exempt financial services, with taxable service portions flagged.
• Fulfilment and warehousing: GST for Canadian 3PLs; foreign-billed storage stays outside.
• Packaging and shipping supplies: GST, fully claimable, endless.

Underneath, Alberta’s usual quiet: no PST anywhere, exempt insurance with no premium tax line, meals at half credit, payroll out of scope.

The clearing account habit

Platform payouts arrive as bundles: sales, refunds, fees, and adjustments compressed into one deposit. Post them through a payout clearing account instead of straight to the bank feed’s guess. The connector’s summarized sales entries hit revenue with their tax codes, the fee entries hit their expense accounts, and the deposit clears the balance to zero; anything left standing in clearing at month end is a discrepancy with a name. Stores that skip the clearing step end up reconciling revenue to bank deposits, which conflates tax, fees, and FX into one unexplainable number precisely where the GST filing needs three explainable ones.

Assembly instructions

1. Turn on sales tax so the base codes exist, then import the chart under Settings, Import data, Chart of accounts.
2. Point the storefront connector’s summarized entries at these accounts.
3. Enable destination-province codes as the delivery map grows.
4. File customs paperwork with its entries and audit the fee accounts quarterly for foreign vendors newly charging tax.
5. Revisit the enabled province codes each January in case a rate moved somewhere you ship.

Inventory counts close the loop: a periodic count adjusted through cost of goods sold keeps shrinkage, damage, and sample giveaways from hiding inside margin, and it keeps the stock number the balance sheet claims honest against the warehouse the CBSA paperwork built.

Reconciliation, not entry, is where store books are won, but the entries still have to be right first. Dext keeps recurring supplier bills rule-coded. ExpenseFlow reads each document, distinguishes the three fee-billing worlds, ties import GST to customs paper, and posts coded transactions into QuickBooks against this exact structure. Hubdoc stores the source documents where review expects them.

The Xero build of this chart is at Alberta ecommerce chart of accounts for Xero; code definitions live in the Alberta QuickBooks sales tax reference.