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CSV of contractor accounts with BC-correct QBO codes and per-account notes. Import file below.
Download chart of accounts (CSV)Also available
A BC contractor’s QuickBooks file has to hold a line most provinces never draw: labour at 5% with the tax coming back, materials and iron at 12% with most of it staying. Blur that line and job costing drifts about 7% optimistic on everything physical. This chart of accounts draws it in the account defaults, where crews and office staff cannot miss it.
Cost of sales, split the BC way
- Subcontractor labour:
GST BC, services being outside PST. Registered subs produce credits; small suppliers produce clean no-tax bills; and the single account keeps CRA’s T5018 reporting a one-report affair. - Materials:
GST/PST BC, with the note spelling out why the 7% never returns: the contractor consumes what the building keeps. True cost is invoice price less the GST credit only. - Equipment and tool rentals:
GST/PST BC; leased goods carry PST every billing cycle. - Safety gear and PPE:
GST/PST BC; goods are goods. - Permits and inspection fees:
Out of scope; municipalities do not make supplies.
Holdbacks, lien law in account form
Holdbacks receivable and holdbacks payable carry the retained percentages outside ordinary AR and AP, at Out of scope until release. The GST on a released holdback generally becomes payable then, which is exactly the kind of timing that vanishes when retention hides inside receivables. Book releases as events against these accounts, promptly, and the lien calendar and the tax calendar stay reconciled.
Office texture, BC edition
The overhead accounts encode the province’s quirks so nobody re-learns them: software and telephone at 12% (BC taxes both), office consumables at 12%, commercial rent GST-only, crew meals GST-only (food is PST-exempt) with the federal half-credit note, insurance exempt, payroll out of scope. Collected GST feeds the CRA return; if you also sell taxable goods and collect PST, its liability tracks separately for the provincial return.
Materials from out of province still owe the 7%
Buying lumber in Alberta for a Vancouver job does not dodge BC PST; goods brought into the province for use here generally trigger self-assessment, recorded with the standalone PST BC code. The invoice shows Alberta’s clean 5%, the ledger adds the provincial share, and the job cost ends up where it always was, at materials-plus-7. Contractors sourcing across the border for price should compare PST-inclusive numbers, and the bookkeeper’s quarterly sweep of out-of-province supplier bills is what keeps the self-assessment honest.
Getting it running
- Enable sales tax; QuickBooks provisions the full BC code set natively.
- Import the chart (Settings, Import data, Chart of accounts); the import carries structure and the readable CSV carries the coding standard.
- Use projects for job costing, tagging bills and progress invoices per job over these stable accounts.
- Post progress billings from the contract schedule with holdback percentages flowing to their account.
- Sweep materials and labour accounts monthly for crossed codes, the 12-on-labour and 5-on-lumber errors that define BC cleanup work.
- Keep warranty callbacks in the original job’s project so contract profitability includes its aftermath.
Site paper is relentless and mostly physical, which in BC means mostly 12%. Dext holds the lumber yard, fuel card, and rental house to supplier rules. ExpenseFlow reads each bill, applies the labour-versus-materials logic per line, keeps holdbacks out of scope and registration-checked subs at their proper 5%, and posts coded entries into QuickBooks against this chart. Hubdoc archives the originals for the day someone asks.
Running the crew on Xero instead of QuickBooks? The mirrored structure, together with the five custom rates Xero needs for BC work, is at BC construction chart of accounts for Xero. Code meanings live in the BC QuickBooks sales tax reference.