Most Indian bookkeepers who take on a Canadian client get the sales tax wrong inside a quarter,\nand it is almost never the arithmetic. Canadian GST\/HST usually costs you nothing on your own fee,\nbecause the Canada Revenue Agency does not require a non-resident who is not carrying on business\nin Canada to register. What you do own is the tax inside the client’s books: the rate, which\nfollows the customer’s province rather than the client’s, the tax codes that separate zero-rated\nfrom exempt, and the return that reconciles both. Those three decisions are where the file holds\nor fails.<\/p>\n
This article works Canadian GST\/HST from the bookkeeper’s side of the desk rather than the\ntaxpayer’s.<\/p>\n
The confusion starts with a genuine ambiguity, not with carelessness. Two GST\/HST registrations\nexist on any India-to-Canada engagement, yours and the client’s, and virtually everything written\nabout GST\/HST online is written for the second one. So a bookkeeper arrives wanting to know\nwhether to put 5% on an invoice, and leaves having read about small-business filing deadlines that\nwere never theirs to worry about. Separating the two questions is most of the job.<\/p>\n
Fair warning on one date before any of it. Nova Scotia cut its harmonised sales tax from 15% to\n14% on 1 April 2025, and tax codes set before that change are still producing a one-point\novercharge on every Nova Scotia invoice they touch. That’s the sort of error a client’s customer\nspots before the client does. And it’s still wrong, unhelpfully, on a good deal of the secondary\ncontent that ranks for Canadian rate queries.<\/p>\n
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