BC Ecommerce Chart of Accounts for QuickBooks Online (Free)

A BC-based store enjoys one of Canada’s best inventory tax positions and pays for it with the country’s most intricate selling-side coding. Stock arrives PST-free under the resale exemption; sales collect two taxes at home, different taxes everywhere else, and the marketplace clips its fee with PST attached. This QuickBooks Online chart of accounts holds the whole system steady.

Inventory, exempt by discipline

Cost of goods sold codes GST BC, the resale exemption having stripped PST off properly purchased stock. The exemption is administrative, not automatic: your PST number lives with every supplier, and any 12%-coded inventory line is the signal purchasing missed one. Inbound freight and import charges codes Out of scope, the claimable import GST living on CBSA paperwork rather than supplier invoices, duty outside the system, international freight zero-rated. Resale goods dodge PST self-assessment on entry too, one more dividend of the exemption.

Sales, mapped by destination

Online marketplace sales defaults to GST/PST BC for taxable goods delivered at home by a PST-registered seller, with GST BC covering PST-exempt goods, destination provinces’ codes covering their parcels, and Z the exports. Collected PST accumulates in the dedicated liability account for the provincial return, on its own calendar. The monthly reconciliation, platform tax report against the account’s code mix, is what catches postal-code drift before it compounds.

The fee stack, priced honestly

• Marketplace and selling fees: GST/PST BC by default, BC having extended PST to online marketplace services; the 7% is channel cost, the 5% a credit. Foreign platforms outside the regime take the flagged alternatives.
• Payment processing fees: E, exempt financial services.
• Fulfilment and warehousing: GST BC for Canadian 3PL services.
• Packaging and shipping supplies: GST/PST BC; consumables are goods and their PST is cost.

Operating loop

1. Enable sales tax first so the BC codes provision natively, then import the chart under Settings, Import data, Chart of accounts, mapping the four columns the file carries.
2. Route connector summaries through a payout clearing account so sales, refunds, fees, and FX each land coded rather than netted; anything still standing in clearing at month end is a discrepancy with a name.
3. Reconcile twice monthly at filing seasons: GST to the CRA, PST payable to Victoria.
4. File broker statements with their entries; audit fee accounts quarterly for regime changes.
5. Count inventory periodically, adjusting cost of sales so shrinkage stays out of margin, and record self-assessed PST on any stock withdrawn for the business’s own use, since the resale exemption stops where resale does.

Who collects the PST is its own reconciliation now. BC’s marketplace rules put collection obligations on the big facilitator platforms for many sales they process, which means some of your BC orders may arrive with the provincial tax already handled upstream while your own-website orders remain fully yours. The platform’s monthly tax report says which is which; reconcile it against the sales account and the PST payable balance so nothing is remitted twice or assumed remitted by the other party. When the split is unclear for your channel mix, that is a one-time accountant question, not a per-order guess.

The exemption, the marketplace PST, and the destination map each add a way to be slightly wrong at volume. Dext rules the recurring suppliers. ExpenseFlow reads every document, keeps resale stock at 5% and fees at their true 12%, ties import claims to customs paper, and posts coded entries into QuickBooks against this chart. Hubdoc archives the originals the reconciliations depend on.

Prefer Xero? That build, with BC’s required custom rates, is at BC ecommerce chart of accounts for Xero. Code definitions live in the BC QuickBooks sales tax reference.