Alberta Ecommerce Chart of Accounts for Xero (Free)

An online store domiciled in Canada’s only no-PST big province still trades in every Canadian tax system there is, because ecommerce taxes follow the parcel, not the warehouse. This Xero chart gives an Alberta-based seller the account structure where buyer-province rates, border GST, and platform fees each land correctly by default.

Revenue: the parcel decides

Online marketplace sales defaults to AB - GST on Sales for home-province and territory orders, and treats the rest of the country as standing alternatives: Xero’s seeded pairs for Ontario and the Atlantic provinces at their HST rates, BC and Quebec at theirs, and the custom Zero Rated rate for exports. Your storefront computes per-order tax and a connector posts summaries; the account’s job is to accept the whole rate mix and reconcile against the platform’s tax report monthly. What the account must never do is flatten everything to 5% because the business happens to sit in Alberta.

Inventory: the border is the supplier

Inbound freight and import charges codes Out of Scope on purpose. Foreign supplier invoices show no Canadian tax; the claimable 5% arrives via the CBSA at customs, evidenced by the B3 entry or the broker’s statement, and duty stays permanently outside the system. Meanwhile cost of goods sold handles the domestic side at 5% with full credits, zero-rated where the goods are. Keeping the two flows in separate accounts is what keeps every ITC attached to the right document.

Fees: three billing worlds

• Marketplace and selling fees: 5% and creditable when billed from Canada; the simplified-regime warning applies to foreign billing, where handing over your GST number is the fix.
• Payment processing fees: Exempt, as financial services, with the taxable platform-service portions flagged.
• Fulfilment and warehousing: 5% from Canadian 3PLs; foreign warehouses billing from abroad sit outside.
• Packaging and shipping supplies: plain 5%, claimed in full.

PST is somebody else’s system, and that is the point

GST/HST codes cover the federal side and the harmonized provinces, but British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba run standalone PST regimes, and Quebec runs QST, each with its own registration rules for out-of-province sellers. An Alberta store shipping into those provinces may accumulate obligations that no Xero GST rate represents, because collecting a province’s PST starts with registering there, not with a code. The chart cannot make that call; your accountant can, once, based on where your sales actually concentrate. What the chart does is keep destination data clean enough that the question is answerable from a report.

Setup and steady state

Create the three custom 0% rates in Xero first (Tax settings, Tax rates), then import through Accounting, Chart of accounts, Import. After that the discipline is reconciliation: platform tax report to sales account monthly, broker statements filed with freight entries, and a quarterly sweep of the fee accounts for foreign vendors that began charging tax, the signal to send them your registration number.

Refunds keep their tax character: credit the original account with the original rate so a refunded Toronto order backs out 13%, not 5%. Payout currency is a separate concern from tax; reconcile revenue to the platform’s Canadian-dollar tax figures and let the FX difference land in its own account.

Store bookkeeping is a volume sport. Hubdoc captures supplier bills and statements as they come. ExpenseFlow reads each document, separates Canadian-billed from simplified-regime fees, anchors import GST to the customs paperwork, and posts coded entries to Xero against these accounts. Dext holds recurring suppliers to rules across thousands of documents.

QuickBooks version of the same structure: Alberta ecommerce chart of accounts for QuickBooks. The rate list behind it: Alberta Xero tax rates reference.