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CSV of realtor accounts with Quebec-correct Xero defaults and the commission and vehicle notes.
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A Quebec real estate practice bills the country’s highest combined tax on its commissions and recovers nearly all of what it spends, a fair trade once the books are structured for it. This Xero chart of accounts encodes that structure: dual-tax commissions, a fully-recoverable production stack, the regulator’s out-of-scope fees, and the vehicle discipline no province excuses.
Commissions, both taxes, both numbers
Commission income defaults to QC - GST/QST on Sales: the exempt resale home still produces a taxable brokerage service, so 14.975% rides on every commission with both registration numbers on the invoice. Referral fees between registered practices are taxable services on their own visible line. The cash habit follows the bigger tax: move the combined tax share of each commission deposit to savings on arrival, and the Revenu Quebec filing stops competing with slow months.
The production stack, recoverable end to end
- Listing and portal fees: Centris, board dues, franchise portals, the pair with full recovery.
- Photography, staging and floor plans: the pair, recoverable, tracked per listing so cost-per-listing stays a number rather than a feeling.
- Signage and lockboxes: the pair; unlike the PST provinces, nothing lodges permanently in the goods.
- Brokerage desk fees and OACIQ dues: the pair on brokerage services, Out of Scope on the regulator’s licence fees, split per line as the note directs.
- Meals and entertainment: the stereo half-recovery on client dinners, flagged.
The car, twice-disciplined
Motor vehicle expenses takes actual costs at the pair, fuel and repairs recoverable within the passenger-vehicle caps and after personal-use apportionment, insurance exempt with the premium tax as cost. Vehicle allowance claims takes per-kilometre amounts at Out of Scope, compensation rather than purchases. The kilometre log carries both accounts through any review, federal or provincial, and Quebec runs both through one office.
Open-house consumables and closing gifts are ordinary purchases at the pair with recoveries intact, kept in a modest client-gifts line inside marketing so the spend stays budgeted and visible rather than scattered.
Setup and season
- Create the four custom rates (Tax menu, Tax settings, Tax rates: GST on Purchases at 5%, plus the three zeros), then import via Accounting, Chart of accounts, Import, confirming the preview pairs rates and accounts as expected.
- Put both registration numbers in the invoice template before the first commission bills.
- Post brokerage statements in components: gross commission to income, splits reducing it, fees to their accounts at their treatments.
- Tag marketing bills with listing addresses; the cost-per-listing report disciplines the next pitch.
- Reconcile the combined liability to the single Revenu Quebec return each period, sweeping the meals line for stereo overclaims first.
Incorporation keeps the same grammar: a broker’s corporation inherits this chart wholesale, adding shareholder-loan and dividend accounts, with the dual-tax logic untouched.
Client deposits never belong in these books at all: purchase deposits sit in the brokerage’s trust account under OACIQ rules, they are not the broker’s money, and no tax event touches them until they become someone’s consideration at closing. The only deposit-adjacent entry a broker’s own file should ever see is the commission that eventually flows from the completed deal, taxed as commissions always are.
The receipts of the trade are earned between showings and lost by Friday. Hubdoc captures them from a phone first. ExpenseFlow reads each receipt and bill, applies the pair-with-recovery defaults, the out-of-scope allowance and regulator lines, and the half-recovery meals rule, and posts coded entries into Xero while the market moves. Dext keeps Centris and the boards consistent through supplier rules.
The QuickBooks rendering is at Quebec real estate chart of accounts for QuickBooks; the rates are documented in the Quebec Xero tax rates reference.