Retail accountant in Mission

Two sales taxes, one transaction, one point-of-sale system

British Columbia never harmonised, so a Mission till is running two tax systems at once. GST applies broadly at 5% and what you pay on purchases comes back as an input tax credit. PST applies at 7% to goods and a defined list of services, is filed separately to the province, and is not generally recoverable on what you buy for the business. That asymmetry has a practical consequence: a display fixture, a shelving unit or a new till carries PST that stays in your cost base permanently, while the GST on the same invoice does not. Retailers who treat the two as one number consistently overstate what they can reclaim.

The bigger risk is at the product level. Not everything you sell is taxable the same way — basic groceries, certain children’s items and various other categories are treated differently between the two taxes, and the point-of-sale system applies whatever tax code was attached to the product when it was created. One miscoded line item on a fast-moving SKU repeats itself thousands of times before anyone notices, and both the customer receipt and the return are wrong. The fix is auditing tax codes against the actual product mix, once, properly.

Closing stock is a tax figure before it is an operational one

Cost of goods sold is opening stock plus purchases minus closing stock. That last term is the only one you estimate rather than read off a bank statement, and it lands directly on taxable income — overstate it and you pay tax on profit you did not make, understate it and you have a deduction that will not stand up. A count is what makes the figure defensible. It also has to be valued correctly: what belongs in the cost of stock is the purchase price plus what it took to get the goods into saleable condition, including freight in and duty, which is why a shop that values stock at supplier invoice alone is understating it. Goods in transit and stock on consignment are the two edges where a Mission shop usually gets it wrong in one direction or the other.

Stock that stopped selling

Every shop accumulates it — the end of a discontinued line, the seasonal buy that missed, the damaged unit nobody wrote off. On the shelf it still counts as an asset at full cost, which inflates the closing stock figure and therefore the tax bill. Writing it down is legitimate when it is genuinely worth less than cost, but it needs to be identified and documented rather than applied as a broad percentage at year-end. The same applies to shrinkage: an unexplained gap between the system count and the physical count is information about the business, not just a bookkeeping adjustment.

What Mission’s trade patterns do to the numbers

Mission’s retail sits on a smaller, steadier base than the highway corridor to the south, with a First Avenue and Junction mix serving a local population and a seasonal lift from river, trail and recreation traffic in the warmer months. Two things follow from that. The seasonal swing means cash is tied up in stock ahead of the season and released after it, so the bank balance in March says very little about the year — a profitable shop can look poor on the day. And a customer base that is largely local makes margin by department, rather than in aggregate, the number worth watching: one strong category quietly subsidising two weak ones is invisible in a single overall gross margin.

Selling in more than one place

A Mission shop that adds an online storefront, a market stall or a wholesale line has not just added revenue, it has added tax questions. Sales shipped to other provinces follow the destination’s rate rather than British Columbia’s, which means an order to Ontario carries 13% HST and one to Alberta carries 5% GST. Marketplace platforms may handle some of that collection and may not, and the answer determines what belongs on your own return. Keeping the channels in one set of books rather than reconciling three separate systems at year-end is what makes any of it manageable; the e-commerce accounting page covers the online side, and the BC tax facts tables set out the provincial rates.

Working with a Mission retailer remotely

EverStone is a sole practitioner firm with a single office at 32615 South Fraser Way in Abbotsford. There is no Mission location and no staff there. Point-of-sale exports, bank feeds and supplier invoices all arrive electronically, questions are handled by email or video call, and the year-end is prepared without anyone closing the shop for a meeting. The CPA who reviews your stock valuation is the one who signs the corporate return built on it.