Alberta Real Estate Chart of Accounts for QuickBooks Online (Free)

Real estate bookkeeping fails in predictable places: commissions booked without their tax, one blurry vehicle account, brokerage statements posted as lump sums. This Alberta chart of accounts for QuickBooks Online is built to make each of those failures structurally awkward, on the simplest tax base in the country.

Income that carries its own tax

Commission income codes GST. Alberta’s 5% applies to every commission a registered agent earns, exempt-home deals included, because the agency service is its own taxable supply. The habit that follows: invoice with the tax, then move the GST share of each deposit to a separate savings account the same day, so the quarterly filing draws on money already parked rather than on whatever the slow month left behind.

The vehicle, disciplined

Two accounts, enforced by notes. Motor vehicle expenses holds fuel, maintenance, and the car’s own insurance: GST-coded where tax was charged, E for the premium, with the federal caveats (passenger-vehicle ITC ceiling, personal-use split) written where the bookkeeper will see them. Vehicle allowance claims holds per-kilometre amounts at Out of scope; allowances compensate, they do not purchase. The contemporaneous kilometre log is what makes either account survive review.

Production costs, kept countable

• Listing and portal fees (GST): board dues, MLS, franchise portals, credits collected in full.
• Photography, staging and floor plans (GST): attach the listing address to each bill and cost-per-listing becomes a report instead of a guess.
• Signage and lockboxes (GST).
• Brokerage desk fees (GST): the practice’s largest recurring overhead, fully creditable, on its own line.
• Meals and entertainment (GST, half the credit): client dinners accumulate here, flagged.

Brokerage statements deserve line-item respect

The monthly brokerage statement is the deal’s financial autopsy, and posting it as one number wastes it. A typical statement nets your commission against the split, desk fees, transaction fees, and sometimes advertising recovered by the brokerage. Each component has its own account and treatment in this chart: gross commission to income at GST, the brokerage’s share reducing it, fees to their expense lines with their credits. Ten extra minutes per statement keeps every number auditable and every credit claimed. Agents who post the net deposit lose the credits inside the statement and cannot answer basic questions about their own cost structure at year end.

From import to routine

QuickBooks’ chart import moves structure only, so run it under Settings, Import data, Chart of accounts, then work from the readable CSV as the coding sheet. Enable sales tax first; GST, Z, E, and Out of scope provision automatically for an Alberta company.

1. Post brokerage statements in components: commission splits to income, fees to their accounts.
2. Keep the kilometre log current; the allowance account depends on it.
3. Sweep the meals and vehicle accounts before each filing; they are where agent returns leak.
4. File closed-deal paperwork against its entries so commission questions have one-click answers.
5. Reconcile the tax savings account to the GST collected balance monthly.

Set a quarterly reminder to review the code mix on income: every commission at GST, referral fees visible, nothing netted. Ten minutes against the deal list catches the missed-tax invoice while it is still correctable with a smile.

The trade’s receipts are born mobile and die crumpled. Dext rules the recurring vendors. ExpenseFlow reads receipts and bills as they are captured, applies this chart’s treatments, GST on desk fees, out-of-scope allowances, limited meals credits, and posts coded entries into QuickBooks while the market is still moving. Hubdoc archives the originals against the trail.

On Xero instead? The mirrored chart is at Alberta real estate chart of accounts for Xero; code semantics live in the Alberta QuickBooks sales tax reference.