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Handle GST/HST/QST on Employee Expenses with Ease
Monday, 5 May 2025
Written by Serge Vanier, CPA

Advataxes software/App handle GST HST QST recovery rules on employee expenses and corporate credit cards with ease: 1. Default Sales Tax Rules at the Employee Level For employees incurring expenses primarily in Quebec, the default tax applied will Read more…

GST/HST Holiday on Meals for 2 Months ?
GST HST will go down and back up
Friday, 22 November 2024
Written by Serge Vanier, CPA

On November 21, 2024 finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced a GST/HST holiday on a series of goods including meals for a two-month period starting on December 14, 2024. As of this day, There is no indication that the Read more…

Venture Summit – 2024 Toronto Collision Conference Edition 2024
Collison Conference 2024 Toronto
Tuesday, 2 July 2024
Written by Serge Vanier, CPA

During the Venture summit of the 2024 Toronto Collision Edition Conference on June 4th 2024 Advataxes, a software/app for the digital transformation of the employee expense, and credit card statement processes was presented to tech professionals. The Collision Read more…

Dark Clouds on the Horizon for the GST/HST/QST Factors Method?
Dark Clouds
Friday, 17 November 2023
Written by Serge Vanier, CPA

In recent years, new sales tax registration programs have been created for GST/HST/QST purposes allowing non resident vendors of the digital economy to collect the GST/HST and the QST under a simplified program. These entities are now tagged Read more…

Digitization will Prepare Companies to Compete Globally – David Dodge – Former Bank of Canada Governor*
Digitization
Wednesday, 19 July 2023
Written by Serge Vanier, CPA

*(Comment published last month in the Financial Post) Indeed, there are great advantages in digitizing a business process. The obvious ones are faster access to information, it is more sharable, it increases productivity, higher mobility & higher security. Read more…

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Handle GST/HST/QST on Employee Expenses with Ease

May 5, 2025 by Serge Vanier, CPA Leave a Comment

Advataxes software/App handle GST HST QST recovery rules on employee expenses and corporate credit cards with ease:

1. Default Sales Tax Rules at the Employee Level

For employees incurring expenses primarily in Quebec, the default tax applied will be 5% GST and 9.975% QST. For those based in Ontario, the default is the 13% HST and so forth. Advataxes automates the application of the appropriate sales tax rules based on the employee primary location, ensuring maximum sales tax automation. This significantly reduces the time employees and approvers spend managing expense claims, especially when dealing with high volumes. Advataxes also tracks and aggregates employee expenses, turning complex transactions into simplified, organized expense reports.

2. Editing Tax Amount

Employees and approvers can edit the precalculated tax amount to ensure that they match taxes on the picture of their invoice. Its an easy task where you don’t have to be a tax expert. Furthermore, your employees will not have to identify portion of an invoice that is not subject to tax.

GST HST QST on Meals and Tips

Advataxes includes a dedicated field specifically for tips. GST, HST, and QST are calculated based solely on the meal amount, excluding any tips. Entering a tip in the designated field does not affect the calculation of these taxes.
The platform follows the exact method required for GST/HST and QST purposes, ensuring precise tax amounts are calculated on meal invoices that include tips. Our OCR technology—available on both the website and the app—automatically extracts the relevant information from invoices, eliminating the need to manually identify non-taxable portions.
If the meal expense is subject to the 50% tax deductibility rule, this adjustment is made in a second step.

See this video here!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: app, corporate credit card, credit card, crédit corporatives, deductibility rule, employee epenses, expense claims, expense reports, GST, HST, logiciel, Meal, nontaxable, OCR, Ontario, pourboires, qst, Quebec, règles en taxes, sales tax, software, tax deductibility, tip, TPS, TVH, TVQ

GST/HST Holiday on Meals for 2 Months ?

November 22, 2024 by Serge Vanier, CPA Leave a Comment

On November 21, 2024 finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced a GST/HST holiday on a series of goods including meals for a two-month period starting on December 14, 2024. As of this day, There is no indication that the Quebec Government, as it often does, will harmonize the QST regime with this announcement. Also the provinces with a harmonized tax have not confirmed this change, and they should since they will be the ones paying for the PVAT (provincial value added tax) portion i.e 8% or 10%. Finally assuming it will be adopted by parliament, has several implications on meals that are incurred by organizations in the course of their activities, such as the one contained on expense reports and on corporate credit card statements:

• There would be presumably no GST/HST on meals across the country
• In Québec, solely the QST would be applicable at a rate of 9.975%

As for Advataxes whenever employees select the “meal” category and the date of the receipt from December 14th, 2024 to February 15th, 2025 then the tax paid will be as follows:

• No GST/HST
• In Québec, the QST at 9.975%
• If some harmonized provinces do not harmonize wuth this measure, then we would use the PVAT (i.e. 8% or 10%)

Of course, employees should validate the tax amount on the meal receipt and the one in Advataxes and rectify as the case may be. With Advataxes, there is no configuration involved by accountants, we take care of automating this tax rule change for all of our clients.
Furthermore, for those clients where it is applicable, the QST input tax refund will be calculated at a rate of 50% of the tax paid. Lastly, any tip amount will, as usual, be excluded from the tax calculation.

Factors method

As for the factors method (see our page “Exact Method VS Factors Method“), one of the conditions to use it is that an expense report should be taxable at 90% or more. Considering that meal expenses are generally big-ticket items in an expense report, one would ponder whether input tax credits or GST/HST rebate can actually be claimed when using the factors method for expense reports covered by the GST/HST holiday. Advataxes is solely set for the exact method.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Creditcardstatement, Expensereport, GST, HST, Meal, SAAS, TAXholiday

Venture Summit – 2024 Toronto Collision Conference Edition 2024

July 2, 2024 by Serge Vanier, CPA Leave a Comment

During the Venture summit of the 2024 Toronto Collision Edition Conference on June 4th 2024 Advataxes, a software/app for the digital transformation of the employee expense, and credit card statement processes was presented to tech professionals. The Collision Conference is one of the largest north American conferences on Technology.

The presentation included the following 2 points:

1) Design for Canadian tax rules

Advataxes has a particular design, it stores a default jurisdiction (i.e. province, state) in the profile of each employee, which is an efficient way to implement the GST/HST and QST exact method, thus maximizing tax recoveries in an environment where the factors method is more difficult to implement than ever due to changing tax and economic landscapes (see our page exact method versus factors method)

2) Posting Credit Card Statement

An administrator of an Advataxes account can upload a single file listing all credit card transactions of all employees in the respective profile of each employee holding a credit card. Afterwards, employees, using our App or the website connection, will have to attach a digital file of their receipts with each transaction. A corporate credit card statement (i.e. VISA, MC, AMEX, etc…) is not a valid document both for Canadian income tax and Canadian sales tax purposes, so an invoice has to be attached to each transaction. That is why Advataxes is built with tools to facilitate the attachment of a digital image to each transaction.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: GST, HST, qst, SAAS

Dark Clouds on the Horizon for the GST/HST/QST Factors Method?

November 17, 2023 by Serge Vanier, CPA Leave a Comment

In recent years, new sales tax registration programs have been created for GST/HST/QST purposes allowing non resident vendors of the digital economy to collect the GST/HST and the QST under a simplified program. These entities are now tagged since July 1, 2023 with the last 6 digits of their GST program number as “RT9999”. Under the QST regime, the letters “NR” are at the beginning of the 10-digit QST registration number and identifies registrants under the specified system. A company operating in the digital economy that is located in Canada but outside Quebec could qualify and apply to the Quebec designated registration.

Under the rules of those 2 specified programs, non resident suppliers should not collect GST/HST/QST from clients that would acquire those goods and services that would otherwise give rise to an input tax or a rebate. Indeed, registrants are not allowed to claim that kind of tax neither as an input tax nor as a rebate. Therefore, clients have to provide their tax registration number to these non resident vendors of the digital economy under this compliance process so these companies don’t collect the tax.

It is more difficult to qualify to the factors method due to the rules governing the digital economy

For those using the factors method to handle GST/HST/QST recoveries on employee expenses, they should know that they are only entitled to claim taxes on a given expense report when that report is subject to tax at a ratio of at least 90% (see our page for further details). Since there will now be a growing number of suppliers who are providing supplies that can be used in the course of commercial activities and that will no longer qualify for the 90% rule, the use of the factor methods is now more difficult that ever to comply with. As of November 13th 2023, there were 1352 entities registered under that program at the federal level and 1594 at the Québec level. Both of these numbers are up from a week ago.

This is a series of examples of entities that are registered to the specified program at the federal level: Airbnb Ireland UC, Amazon (12 entities), DropBox, Expedia, Google LLC, LinkedIn Corporation, Meta Payment Inc., Monday.com, TeamViewer Germany GmbH, etc…

This is a series of examples of entities that are registered to the specified program for QST purposes: Digital River GmbH, Expedia, GoDaddy.com LLC, Google LLC, Indeed Ireland Operations Ltd., Upwork Global Inc, TikTok, Toronto Star Newspaper Inc., Twitter, VistaPrint Canada Coproration, Zoho Corporation, etc…
(Note: you will find at the end of this posting a larger sampling).

Any of these suppliers in your employee’s expense reports ?

Organizations who are questioning the use of their GST/HST/QST factors method could notably compare if these suppliers are found in expense reports submitted by their employees.

In conclusion, although there is a trend for organizations to revisit their employee expense process using the Excel spreadsheet and paper documents to embrace the digital transformation, they should also revisit the use of the factors method. The exact method may be the one to embrace in light of the detrimental impact that the new simplified GST/HST/QST programs and the expansion of the digital economy are having on the factors method.

Simplified GST/HST Registry

There are 1352 entries as of November 13th 2023 that includes the following:

• Airbnb Ireland UC
• Alibaba.com Private Singapore E-commerce Private Limited
• Amazon (12 different legal entities)
• Bloomberg Index Services Limited
• Booking.com B.V.
• British Broadcasting Corporation
• DropBox
• Ebooks.com
• Expedia
• GitHub
• Godaddy.com LLC
• Google LLC
• Hotels.com L.P.
• Hotwire Inc.
• Indeed Ireland Operation Limited
• LinkedIn Corporation
• McAfee Consumer Affairs North LLC
• Meta Payments Inc.
• Monday.com
• Priceline.com LLC
• Shutterstock Inc
• Slack Technologies Inc
• TeamViewer Germany GmbH
• TikTok Inc
• Trello Inc
• Twillo
• Twitter Inc.

The federal registry is available here:

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/businesses/topics/gst-hst-businesses/digital-economy-gsthst/confirming-simplified-gst-hst-account-number.html#wb-auto-4

Suppliers Outside Québec That Are Registered for the QST Under the Specified System

The registry is made of 1594 entries as of November 13, 2023 and includes the following:

• Airbnb Ireland UC
• Amazon.com Services LLC
• Digital River GmbH
• DropBox Inc.
• Expedia Inc.
• GitHub, Inc.
• GoDaddy.com LLC
• Google LLC
• Hotels.com LP
• Indeed Ireland Operations Ltd.
• LinkedIn Corporation
• (Mailchimp) The Rocket Science Group LLC
• Meta Payments, Inc.
• Priceline
• Shutterstock, Inc.
• Sync.com Inc.
• Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
• Trello, Inc
• Twilllo Inc.
• Twitter Inc.
• Upwork Global Inc.
• Vimeo.com Inc.
• Vistaprint Canada Corporation
• Zoho Corporation

The Quebec registry can be accessed here:

https://www.revenuquebec.ca/en/businesses/consumption-taxes/gsthst-and-qst/special-cases-gsthst-and-qst/suppliers-outside-quebec/suppliers-outside-quebec-that-are-registered-for-the-qst-under-the-specified-system/

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: digitaleconomy, exactmethod, expensereports, factorsmethod, GST, HST, qst

Digitization will Prepare Companies to Compete Globally – David Dodge – Former Bank of Canada Governor*

July 19, 2023 by Serge Vanier, CPA Leave a Comment

*(Comment published last month in the Financial Post)

Indeed, there are great advantages in digitizing a business process. The obvious ones are faster access to information, it is more sharable, it increases productivity, higher mobility & higher security.

The specific benefit in digitizing the employee expense report process includes offering a much better employee experience in comparison to requiring employees to fill out a spreadsheet and join receipts in an email. It provides a better insight into spending.

As for the specific benefits of Advataxes, it involves accessing and implementing sales tax rules and business rules that would be very hard to implement at the cost of a reasonable effort, such as being able to use the exact method for GST/HST/QST purposes, integrate a distance calculator, an OCR, an App, send an email alert when the 5,000 KM threshold has been reached for an employee in a given year, calculate taxes in meals but not on tips, have different sales tax recovery rates for non profit organizations for expenses incurred in different provinces, etc…

After all, competitivity is a key matter.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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LATEST BLOG POSTS

  • Handle GST/HST/QST on Employee Expenses with Ease
  • GST/HST Holiday on Meals for 2 Months ?
  • Venture Summit – 2024 Toronto Collision Conference Edition 2024
  • Dark Clouds on the Horizon for the GST/HST/QST Factors Method?
  • Digitization will Prepare Companies to Compete Globally – David Dodge – Former Bank of Canada Governor*

About Advataxes

Advataxes is an online accounting software for employee expenses that automates recoverable GST/HST and QST for small, medium and large businesses. Employees can fill out and submit their expense reports to their supervisors from anywhere using their PC, tablet or smartphone in no time. This online software is available in English and French. Advataxes is a product of Ad Valorem which is a member of Antea an internationnal association of independent firms.

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