Setting up GST, HST, PST & QST

Sales tax is usually where spreadsheet bookkeeping quietly falls apart. GBooks Air keeps what you collect on sales separate from what you pay on purchases (your input tax credits), so when it's time to file you're working from real numbers instead of a guess.

First: are you registered?

Everything else depends on this one answer.

• Registered — you charge GST/HST on taxable sales, and you can claim back whatever GST/HST you pay on business purchases (input tax credits, or ITCs). Enter your business number in Settings.
• Not registered (small supplier) — you don't charge tax, and you can't claim ITCs either. Leave the registration field blank; GBooks Air won't add tax to your invoices, but it'll still keep an eye on your rolling revenue against the $30,000 small-supplier threshold.

How your province sets the defaults

Setting your province in Settings gives every invoice and expense a sensible starting point:

• GST-only provinces/territories (Alberta, NWT, Nunavut, Yukon) — 5% GST.
• HST provinces (Ontario and Atlantic Canada) — one combined federal-provincial rate; Ontario's sits at 13%.
• GST + PST provinces (BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) — 5% GST plus the provincial rate, tracked as two separate amounts, since they get filed with two different governments.
• Quebec — 5% GST plus 9.975% QST, also tracked separately since QST files with Revenu Québec.

All current rates ship with the app and stay maintained against CRA and provincial figures. You'll never need to type a rate in by hand.

Selling to customers in other provinces

For GST/HST, the general rule for most goods and services is place of supply: you charge the rate for your customer's province, not your own. An Ontario consultant billing an Alberta client charges 5% GST, not 13% HST. On any invoice you can override the tax treatment per line — pick the destination province, and GBooks Air applies the correct rate.

Tracking input tax credits on purchases

When you categorize an expense, mark whether tax was included, and GBooks Air splits it out — the pre-tax amount goes to your expense account, and the GST/HST goes to your ITC tracker. Receipt OCR helps here too, since it reads the tax line straight off receipts. By the time filing rolls around, your ITC total is a report you pull up, not something you piece together from a shoebox.

Seeing what you owe

The Sales Tax report shows tax collected on sales, ITCs on purchases, and the net owing (or refundable) for any period, laid out to line up with the main boxes on the GST/HST return. For a full filing walkthrough, see Preparing your GST/HST return.