Ontario Restaurant Chart of Accounts for QuickBooks Online (Free)

Run a kitchen’s books in QuickBooks Online and the tax question changes with every invoice line: the produce order is zero-rated, the pop and candy on the same delivery carry 13%, the menu you sell is taxable, and the licence that lets you pour is outside the system entirely. This Ontario hospitality chart of accounts pins each of those answers to an account, in QuickBooks’ own code vocabulary.

Built around how food flows

The direct-cost section mirrors the walk-in: food stock and ingredients codes Z because basic groceries are taxable at zero, with HST ON flagged for the taxable exceptions every distributor slips into an order (snacks, carbonated drinks, ready-made items). Alcohol stock codes HST ON at 13% with a full input tax credit since it is resale inventory, not entertainment. Food and beverage sales carry HST ON on the way out, because prepared food sold in Ontario is a 13% supply regardless of how its raw ingredients came in.

That in-zero, out-13 asymmetry is the whole reason a generic chart fails a restaurant: one food account with one code is wrong in at least one direction every single day.

The operating accounts that carry hospitality quirks

• Liquor and business licences code Out of scope; AGCO and municipal fees are not supplies and hold no credits.
• Cleaning and laundry plus smallwares and consumables run at HST ON with full ITCs, at restaurant volume.
• Kitchen and bar equipment in fixed assets keeps the big HST claims and the capital-cost-allowance trail tidy.
• Meals and entertainment and staff events keep the 50% ITC caution: full 13% on the receipt, half the credit for most businesses.
• Insurance is exempt from GST/HST but Ontario’s 8% RST typically rides on the premium as an unrecoverable cost.

Import, then code from the sheet

QuickBooks’ chart import carries no tax settings, so setup is two steps. First, with sales tax already enabled (which provisions HST ON, Z, E, and Out of scope for an Ontario company), import the account file under Settings, Import data, Chart of accounts. Second, put the readable CSV where the coding happens: it lists each account’s default code, the exceptions, and one-line reasons. On transaction lines, QuickBooks applies whatever code the person or tool picks, so the sheet is the standard that keeps five different people coding one way.

Habits that keep it accurate

1. Split broadline distributor invoices line by line; mixed zero-rated and taxable lines on one bill are normal, not an error.
2. Keep LCBO and brewery purchases in alcohol stock even when they arrive on a general supplier statement.
3. Treat licence renewals as calendar events coded out of scope.
4. Sample-check a week of coded purchases before each GST/HST filing; ingredient miscodes compound quietly.

On the revenue side, wire the POS to post a daily sales summary: gross by category, HST collected, tips held apart. Rounding differences between what the POS calculated per order and what a summary computes on the total are normal; reconcile to the POS tax report, not to a recalculation, and the filing ties out without Friday-night forensics.

Receipts and supplier bills arrive in hospitality at a pace that breaks manual coding first. Dext applies supplier rules to the regulars. ExpenseFlow reads each invoice line, separates zero-rated groceries from 13% items on the same document, keeps licences out of scope, and posts coded transactions into QuickBooks against exactly these accounts. Hubdoc holds the source documents for the paper trail.

Prefer Xero behind the bar? The same structure with Xero’s Canadian rate names is at Ontario hospitality chart of accounts for Xero. The code definitions live in the Ontario QuickBooks sales tax codes reference.