BC Agency Chart of Accounts for QuickBooks Online (Free)

The tax profile of a BC agency fits on a napkin: everything you sell and almost everyone you pay runs at creditable 5%, and the province collects its 7% almost entirely through the tools you subscribe to. The trick is keeping those two worlds from cross-contaminating in the books, which is what this QuickBooks Online chart of accounts is for.

The 5% world: people and services

Services income codes GST BC for home-province clients, with the client’s province governing everything else: HST ON for the Toronto retainer, Z for qualifying export work, each enabled once from QuickBooks’ built-in list. Freelancer and contractor costs codes GST BC for registered contractors, whose tax returns whole, and holds small-supplier bills at no tax with no credit, the registration check noted where onboarding happens. Pass-through media and ad spend isolates client-billed platform money with its per-vendor credit story, Canadian-billed versus simplified-regime, kept per campaign.

The 12% world: the stack

Software subscriptions codes GST/PST BC: BC taxes software, so every seat license carries an unrecoverable 7% past the GST credit. Telephone and internet and computer equipment share the treatment. For an agency these three accounts are effectively the whole provincial tax bill, and they are also where files migrated from GST-only provinces silently miscode, claiming a 12% that was never all creditable or booking a 5% that ignored real PST on the invoice.

The accounts that need one line of law each

• Legal and professional fees: GST BC default, 12% alternative; lawyers carry PST, accountants do not.
• Professional dues: GST BC with the credit; recreational clubs never yield an ITC.
• Professional liability insurance: E, premiums exempt, no PST line.
• Home office: Out of scope, income tax territory.
• Meals and entertainment: GST BC (BC food is PST-exempt) at the federal 50% credit.

Making it run

1. Enable sales tax; the BC codes provision natively, nothing to build.
2. Import the chart (Settings, Import data, Chart of accounts) and circulate the readable CSV as the coding sheet.
3. Use billable expenses for rebills; the rebilled line takes your invoice’s code.
4. Quarterly: reconcile the client list to the income account’s code mix, the contractor roster to registration statuses, and cull the software account, whose orphaned subscriptions are usually also its miscoded ones.
5. When a seat license migrates from a foreign biller to a Canadian entity, or the reverse, update its expected code on the sheet the same week; vendor billing moves are the stack’s main source of silent drift.

Retainer timing stays federal: GST lands at the earlier of invoice and payment, so deferred revenue kept visible keeps filings aligned with paper rather than effort.

Production purchases blur the line deliberately, and the chart un-blurs them. Props for the shoot, sample prints, branded merchandise for the campaign: goods, GST/PST BC, their 7% part of production cost even when the client ultimately pays. Flag them billable, let the cost flow to the invoice at your service’s code, and keep them in the pass-through account rather than office supplies, so campaign margins carry their true weight and the office budget stays uncontaminated by production’s shopping.

The agency document stream is a steady drizzle of small judgment calls, identical-looking and divergent. Dext rules the recurring vendors. ExpenseFlow reads each bill, applies the 5-versus-12 split, the contractor logic, and the client-province rates this chart encodes, and posts coded entries into QuickBooks. Hubdoc keeps the paper filed against the trail.

Prefer Xero for the studio? That version, together with the custom rates BC requires on that platform, is at BC agency chart of accounts for Xero. Codes are documented in the BC QuickBooks sales tax reference.