Storefronts & Online Sellers
Selling online means selling across provinces — and every province with a sales tax has its own registration rules. Add marketplace platforms that collect some taxes but not others, and payout reports that never quite match your bank deposits, and the bookkeeping gets complicated fast.
Multiply that by marketplace platforms that collect some taxes but not others, and payout reports that never quite match your bank deposits, and the bookkeeping gets complicated fast.
How we help
- Inventory and cost-of-sales tracking that produces real margins, not guesses
- GST place-of-supply rules applied correctly for interprovincial sales
- Provincial sales tax registrations — BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec each have their own thresholds
- Reconciling Shopify, Amazon, and other platform payouts to actual sales, fees, and taxes collected
- Marketplace rules sorted out — what the platform remits for you and what remains your job
- Year-end inventory valuation and cut-off done properly, working from your count records
Common mistakes we see
- Assuming one sales-tax registration covers everything. Selling into other provinces can create obligations in each — BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec each run their own PST/QST systems with their own thresholds.
- Trusting platform payout reports as if they were bookkeeping. Shopify, Amazon, and the rest net out fees, refunds, and taxes in ways that have to be unwound to get true revenue.
- Losing track of inventory value, so year-end cost of goods sold — and therefore taxable income — is wrong.
- Missing GST registration once sales cross the $30,000 small-supplier threshold, then owing tax that was never collected.
The British Columbia angle
BC's PST applies to many goods sold to BC customers regardless of where you're based, and the province enforces it. Selling nationally means watching each province's registration thresholds. We reconcile the platform payouts to real numbers and keep the multi-province sales tax straight.