BC Nonprofit Chart of Accounts for Xero (Funds + GST/PST, Free)

A British Columbia nonprofit answers to funders on restrictions, to the CRA on GST, and to Victoria on a tax that mostly just quietly raises its costs. The bookkeeping job is keeping all three stories straight without burying volunteers in tax theory, which is what an opinionated chart of accounts is for. This one carries fund accounting and BC’s two-tax reality in its structure.

Funds first

Unrestricted funds and restricted funds replace owner equity, because stewardship is the balance-sheet story: donor-restricted money is not spendable general revenue, and every board pack and funder report starts there. Program-level detail rides on Xero tracking categories over a deliberately compact account list.

Revenue in three registers

Donations and grants code Out of Scope; freely given money is not a supply under either tax. Program and membership revenue defaults to the custom GST on Sales (5%) rate with Exempt, Zero Rated, and the 12% pair as standing alternatives: nonprofit income legitimately spans exempt programs, zero-rated sales, GST-only services, and PST-collecting merchandise, and each stream deserves one deliberate classification recorded in the readable CSV at launch. Other income keeps exempt interest out of the way.

Costs, where BC’s 7% quietly lives

The GST side of nonprofit costs keeps its federal three-exit structure: input tax credits for the commercial-activity share, the public service bodies’ rebate where qualifying bodies run exempt programs, plain cost otherwise. PST adds a fourth, simpler fact: the 7% on goods, software, and telecom is cost, full stop, with no rebate system behind it.

• Program delivery costs default to the GST-only rate with the rebate flag, plus the 12% pair for the goods inside program spending, where the PST share should be budgeted as expense.
• Fundraising costs and advertising default GST-only as services, with the goods alternative flagged.
• Software subscriptions and telephone and internet carry the 12% pair; BC taxes both, and for many small nonprofits these lines are the whole provincial tax bill.
• The federal texture persists: half-credit meals, no-credit club dues, exempt insurance and bank fees, out-of-scope payroll.

Setup and stewardship

1. Create the five custom rates in Xero (Tax settings, Tax rates) before importing; the services-and-zeros economy of a nonprofit depends on them.
2. Import via Accounting, Chart of accounts, Import, then layer tracking categories for programs.
3. Route restricted-fund movements through the fund accounts, visibly.
4. Code reimbursements to the underlying expense accounts with their true treatments; the program kitchen’s zero-rated groceries and the taxable printing keep their characters, and the rebate math stays defensible.
5. Have departing treasurers annotate the readable CSV; classification rationale is the hardest knowledge to rebuild.

Registration remains a decision rather than a default, with public service bodies enjoying a friendlier small-supplier threshold than businesses; the classification discipline this chart enforces is precisely the evidence that decision needs.

Grant writing should speak PST too. A funding application that budgets program equipment, laptops, or licensed software at sticker prices will arrive 7% short of reality, because the provincial share is unrecoverable cost for the organization. Budgeting PST-inclusive numbers in proposals is not padding; it is the actual price of delivering the program in this province, and funders accept it when the arithmetic is shown.

Volunteer-run finance survives on consistency the volunteers can keep. Hubdoc captures and archives the paper. ExpenseFlow reads each receipt and bill, applies the GST-only, 12%, exempt, and out-of-scope treatments this chart encodes, and posts coded entries into Xero, holding the standard through personnel churn. Dext adds supplier rules for the recurring vendors.

The QuickBooks build is at BC nonprofit chart of accounts for QuickBooks; rates are documented in the BC Xero tax rates reference.