Quebec Ecommerce Chart of Accounts for QuickBooks Online (Free)

An online store in Quebec runs the country’s full tax gamut every day: two recoverable taxes at home, a different regime at every other destination, a border that splits its collection between customs and the return, and platforms billing from three tax worlds. This QuickBooks Online chart of accounts keeps each flow in its lane.

Orders, coded by the label on the box

Online marketplace sales anchors at GST/QST QC for Quebec deliveries, both components collected with both registration numbers behind them, and expects the full destination set alongside: HST ON at 13%, the other provinces at theirs, Z for exports. The platform computes per-order; the connector posts summaries; the bookkeeper reconciles the code mix to the platform’s tax report monthly. Nothing else keeps ten thousand postal codes honest.

The border, split in two

Cost of goods sold takes domestic restocking at the pair (both recoverable) or the GST code for rest-of-Canada suppliers without QST registration. Inbound freight and import charges takes the international flow at Out of scope: the federal 5% collected by the CBSA claims from the B3 or broker statement, while QST on commercial imports generally self-assesses through the return using the QST QC code, both legs anchored to customs paperwork. Duty stays permanently outside; international freight is zero-rated.

Fees from three worlds

• Marketplace and selling fees: GST/QST QC when Canadian-billed and fully recoverable; GST for federal-only billers; Out of scope plus a registration-number reminder for simplified-regime platforms.
• Payment processing fees: E, exempt financial services.
• Fulfilment and warehousing: the pair for Quebec 3PLs, GST for out-of-province ones.
• Packaging and shipping supplies: the pair, recoverable both ways, endless.

The pair of registration numbers belongs in the storefront’s invoice template for Quebec orders; business buyers claim their recoveries against them, and their absence is the kind of small omission that surfaces as a customer-service ticket at their filing time rather than yours.

Running loop

1. Enable sales tax; Quebec’s codes provision natively. Import the chart under Settings, Import data, Chart of accounts.
2. Route payouts through a clearing account so sales, refunds, fees, and FX post separately; a zero clearing balance at month end is the health check.
3. File customs paperwork with its entries; it carries the ITC claim and the QST self-assessment inputs together.
4. Audit the platform map quarterly; billing regimes move, and each move changes what is recoverable.
5. Count inventory periodically and record own-use withdrawals honestly; both taxes’ recoveries lean on the stock story.
6. Keep the storefront’s Quebec-facing pages and invoices aligned with the province’s French-language expectations; the tax file and the language file share a regulator’s attention.

One return to Revenu Quebec settles both taxes, which concentrates month-end into a single reconciliation, and makes clean entry the whole game.

January deserves a standing appointment in a store’s calendar: the post-holiday returns wave stress-tests the credit-note discipline in both tax directions at once, and it is also the natural moment to re-verify the enabled destination codes against any provincial rate changes, walk the platform map for regime shifts, and archive the prior year’s customs paperwork against its entries. An hour of January housekeeping inoculates the whole filing year.

At store volume the game is automated or lost. Dext rules recurring suppliers. ExpenseFlow reads every document, distinguishes pair-billing from GST-only from unclaimable, ties border claims to customs paper, and posts coded entries into QuickBooks that feed the combined return. Hubdoc archives the originals behind each number.

On Xero instead? That build, with Quebec’s custom rates, is at Quebec ecommerce chart of accounts for Xero. Codes are explained in the Quebec QuickBooks sales tax reference.