Bookkeeping Vancouver

Most Vancouver business owners don’t fall behind on their books because they’re careless. It happens because BC adds a layer the rest of the country doesn’t have. You collect GST for the CRA and PST for the province, they’re filed on separate returns with separate agencies, and the payroll side brings WorkSafeBC on top of the usual CRA remittances. When the books are a few months behind, all of that piles up at once.

Bookkeeping in Vancouver Starts With Two Sales Taxes

In most provinces, a business deals with one sales tax account. In British Columbia there are two. The 5% GST is reported to the CRA, and the 7% PST is registered and filed with the BC government. Each has its own filing frequency, its own return and its own rules on what’s taxable. Some items carry GST but no PST, and a few go the other way.

That’s why bookkeeping in Vancouver needs both taxes tracked separately from the first transaction. If sales and purchases are coded to one combined “tax” account, someone has to pull them apart before either return can be filed, and that work usually happens a week before a deadline.

We set up your chart of accounts so GST collected, input tax credits and PST collected each sit in their own account. Every month the balances are reconciled against what was filed, so the returns come straight out of the books instead of being rebuilt from bank statements.

What Our Bookkeeping Services Vancouver Clients Get Each Month

Our bookkeeping services Vancouver clients use run on QuickBooks Online, and the work is fully remote. Each month we:

Categorize every transaction from your bank, credit card and payment processor feeds
Reconcile each account to its statement
Keep receivables and payables current, so you know who owes you and what you owe
Track GST, input tax credits and PST in separate accounts
Send you a profit and loss statement and balance sheet you can actually use

If you have staff, we can run payroll alongside the books, so source deductions, WorkSafeBC and year-end slips all agree with the general ledger. For incorporated businesses, the books feed straight into the T2. Our post on the BC corporate tax rate explains what that return works out to for a BC corporation.

Small Business Bookkeeping Vancouver Owners Usually Outgrow

A lot of owners start with a spreadsheet or a free app, and that’s fine while revenue is low. It stops working at fairly predictable points: you pass $30,000 in sales and have to register for GST, you start selling taxable goods or services in BC and need a PST number, you hire your first employee, or you incorporate and suddenly have personal and corporate records to keep apart.

Any of those changes the job. Small business bookkeeping at that stage is less about recording transactions and more about making sure each obligation has the right numbers behind it when it’s due. That’s the point where most of our Vancouver clients hand it over.

Catching Up When the Books Are Behind

If you’re already months behind, we start with your bank and credit card statements, rebuild each month in order, reconcile as we go and then flag any GST or PST returns that need to be filed or corrected. Once the backlog is cleared, ongoing monthly bookkeeping takes over.

Getting current sooner is cheaper. The CRA charges a late-filing penalty on GST returns of 1% of the balance owing plus 0.25% for each full month the return is late, up to 12 months. Late payroll remittances are penalized at 3% to 10% depending on how late they are. The BC government applies its own penalties and interest on late PST.