Ontario Ecommerce Chart of Accounts for QuickBooks Online (Free)

An Ontario ecommerce company is really a business trading in five tax jurisdictions at once, plus a border. Orders route to provinces with four different tax systems, stock arrives with GST collected by customs rather than a vendor, and half the fee stack bills from outside Canada. This QuickBooks Online chart of accounts is structured so that reality codes cleanly.

Revenue that changes rate by postal code

Online marketplace sales anchors on HST ON for Ontario deliveries and treats everything else as first-class exceptions rather than noise: GST at 5% for Alberta and territory orders, the BC and Quebec codes where those apply, Atlantic HST at its rates, and Z for export orders. QuickBooks’ built-in provincial code list means each of these is an enable-once affair. The practical loop that keeps it honest is monthly: compare your storefront’s tax summary to the code mix QuickBooks reports on this account.

Inventory and the border

Two accounts split what one account would blur. Cost of goods sold takes domestic purchases: 13% from Canadian suppliers with full input tax credits, Z when the goods themselves are zero-rated. Inbound freight and import charges takes the international flow and codes Out of scope by default, because the overseas invoice carries no Canadian tax; the recoverable 5% import GST lives on the CBSA’s B3 entry or the broker statement, and the account note directs the claim there. Duty is out of scope permanently, and international freight legs are zero-rated.

The fee stack

• Marketplace and selling fees: HST ON when billed from Canada (Amazon.ca, Shopify’s Canadian billing), with the simplified-regime warning attached: hand foreign platforms your registration number, because their charged tax is otherwise unclaimable.
• Payment processing fees: E, since card processing is an exempt financial service, with HST ON for taxable platform services that ride the same statement.
• Fulfilment and warehousing: HST ON for Canadian 3PLs; foreign warehouses billing from abroad sit outside the system.
• Packaging and shipping supplies: HST ON, fully creditable, and endless.

The generic Ontario spine remains underneath: meals with the 50% credit note, exempt insurance carrying the province’s 8% RST as unrecoverable cost, payroll out of scope.

Standing it up

1. Enable sales tax first so the Ontario codes provision; add other provinces from the built-in list as orders demand.
2. Import the chart (Settings, Import data, Chart of accounts); the file carries no tax column because QuickBooks codes at the transaction line.
3. Wire the storefront connector’s summary entries to these accounts.
4. File broker statements with their entries; they are the audit trail for import GST.
5. Revisit enabled codes each January; provincial rates do change, and stale rates miscode quietly.

Returns deserve one paragraph, because stores process them daily and they are where tax coding quietly unravels. A refund is not a negative deposit: issue a credit note that reverses the original sale on the same account with the same tax code, so the 13% collected on the Toronto order leaves the return the way it arrived, and the Alberta refund reverses at 5%. Netting refunds against payouts without the credit note leaves the GST/HST accounts overstating collections, and the fix months later is painful archaeology across platform statements.

At store volume the coding load defeats manual bookkeeping quickly. Dext keeps rule-based consistency for repeat suppliers. ExpenseFlow reads every bill and statement, distinguishes Canadian-billed fees from simplified-regime charges, ties import GST claims to customs documents, and posts coded entries into QuickBooks against exactly this structure. Hubdoc archives the paperwork behind each number.

Selling on Xero instead? The mirrored setup is Ontario ecommerce chart of accounts for Xero. Code meanings and rates are in the Ontario QuickBooks sales tax reference.