When the harmonized sales tax (HST) was introduced in Ontario and British Columbia last year, many entrepreneurs and small business hours were confused about the new rules. The confusion lay not only in what tax applied to what kind of products and services, but also how to charge out of province customers when it came to the sales tax.

Those concerns have been mostly addressed, but now we are in the midst of another set of confusion. After charging the appropriate tax rate for the appropriate customers, how do you go about remitting these collected sales taxes back to the government. The quick method of accounting is supposed to simplify the process, but the introduction of HST has complicated it once more.

Essentially, you need to separate your customer receipts in terms of the tax rate that you charged them. For instance, if you are a BC-based business, your BC-based customers are charged 12% HST while you Alberta-based customers are charged 5% GST. You need to keep them separate and calculate the remittance rates accordingly.

These rates can be found on the Canada Revenue Agency website. In the past, you could clump together all of your (Canadian) clients and largely work with a single remittance rate. If you have customers in multiple provinces with multiple rates, you will now need to calculate them separately, but still remit all of your collected sales taxes at the same time.