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CSV: realtor accounts with Quebec-correct QBO codes and the commission, vehicle and dues notes.
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Quebec asks its realtors to charge the country’s steepest combined tax and returns the favour by recovering nearly everything the practice spends. The bookkeeping that makes both halves true is structural: commissions coded with both taxes, the production stack claiming its recoveries, and the two accounts, vehicle and meals, where discipline replaces optimism. This QuickBooks Online chart of accounts supplies that structure.
Income with both numbers attached
Commission income codes GST/QST QC, the brokerage service being taxable regardless of the home’s exempt status, invoiced with GST and QST registration numbers both displayed. Referral fees stay visible as taxable services rather than vanishing into deal netting. The companion habit scales with the bigger rate: sweep the combined tax share of each deposit into savings immediately, and the single Revenu Quebec filing draws on parked money.
Costs that come back, and the shortlist that does not
- Listing and portal fees (
GST/QST QC): Centris, boards, franchise portals, recoverable in full. - Brokerage desk fees and OACIQ dues: the pair on brokerage services with full recovery; the regulator’s licence fees split to
Out of scopeper the account note. - Photography, staging and floor plans and signage and lockboxes: the pair, recoverable, tagged per listing so cost-per-listing stays reportable.
- Meals and entertainment: the stereo 50% cut on client dinners, flagged where it happens.
- Insurance:
E, with Quebec’s premium tax as unrecoverable cost.
The vehicle, under one watchful administration
Motor vehicle expenses holds actual running costs at the pair, recoveries capped for passenger vehicles and apportioned for personal use under both taxes. Vehicle allowance claims holds per-kilometre compensation at Out of scope. The kilometre log is the document that carries both accounts, and in Quebec one administration reviews the whole picture, which concentrates the incentive to keep it current.
Referral relationships with practices in other provinces follow the client map like any service: the fee takes the recipient practice’s province, invoiced and recovered accordingly, on its own visible line.
From import to spring market
- Enable sales tax first; Quebec’s codes provision natively and everything downstream assumes them. Trust deposits stay in the brokerage’s trust account under OACIQ rules, never in these books.
- Import the chart (Settings, Import data, Chart of accounts) and code from the readable CSV.
- Add both registration numbers to the invoice template on day one.
- Post brokerage statements in components, splits and fees each to their line; the recoveries live in the components.
- Reconcile the combined liability to the Revenu Quebec return each period, sweeping the meals account first.
- Tag every marketing bill with its listing address; cost-per-listing is the practice’s most decision-shaping report and it builds itself from the tags.
Incorporating as a broker’s corporation inherits this chart intact, with shareholder-loan and dividend accounts joining and the dual-tax logic unchanged.
New brokers should calendar two milestones early. Registration for both taxes tends to arrive within the first busy season at commission volumes, and charging correctly from the first taxable deal beats amending later. Instalments follow success: once annual net tax clears the thresholds, Revenu Quebec expects quarterly payments on the combined amount, and the savings-sweep habit this chart recommends is precisely what makes instalment season a non-event.
The trade’s paper is mobile, small, and constant. Dext rules the recurring vendors. ExpenseFlow reads receipts and bills as they are captured, applies the pair-with-recovery defaults, the out-of-scope splits, and the half-recovery meals rule this chart encodes, and posts coded entries into QuickBooks between showings. Hubdoc archives the originals against the trail.
On Xero instead? That build, with Quebec’s custom rates, is at Quebec real estate chart of accounts for Xero. Codes are explained in the Quebec QuickBooks sales tax reference.