From 1 October your bookkeeper adds 7% PST, and you cannot claim it back

Open the folder where your bookkeeping invoices live. Whatever the last one said, the next one after 1 October 2026 says the same number plus 7%. British Columbia is putting provincial sales tax on accounting and bookkeeping that day, and the part that matters is not the rate. It is that PST has no equivalent of the GST refund you are used to, so this one stays on your profit line for good. There is also a legal way to keep two months of it off your bill, and that door shuts on 30 September.

Seven percent, on a bill you already pay

Budget 2026 widened what PST applies to. From 1 October 2026, PST at 7% applies to accounting services, and the province defines that to include bookkeeping and assurance work.

Four other categories join on the same day: architectural, engineering and geoscience, security, and non-residential real estate services. If you buy any of those, read the province's notice for the full list rather than taking anyone's summary for it.

Whoever sells you the service charges the tax. If your bookkeeper is not registered for PST today, they have to be by then.

Why this is not the GST you are used to

You pay GST on almost everything your business buys, and you do not really carry it. You claim it back on your GST return and it nets out.

PST does not work like that. The province puts it plainly in its own small business guide: "Unlike the GST/HST, there are no PST input tax credits provided on goods purchased by a business." That sentence is about goods, and nothing in the new professional services rules adds a credit for services either. What you get instead is a list of exemptions, not a rebate.

So treat this as a price rise on a fixed cost, not a timing issue. It hits net margin on day one.

An illustration on round numbers, not a benchmark for your trade. Say you pay a bookkeeper $450 a month, plus $2,500 a year for the year-end and the corporate return. That is $7,900 a year, so the PST is $553 a year. On a 60% gross margin you need roughly $920 of extra sales to end up where you started.

Across everyone buying these five services, the province budgeted the measure at $261 million in 2026/27 and $534 million in 2027/28.

"Accounting services" is a wider net than your year-end

The definition is long, and worth reading as a list of things you probably buy:

• Preparing financial statements, journal entries, payroll, budgets, and your invoices, bills or statements of account
• Preparing tax or information returns, and applications for a tax credit, rebate or refund
• Bookkeeping, billing, accounts payable, and account reconciliation
• Cost, financial, forensic, management or tax accounting
• Advice, documents or representation on anything tax related

One category is carved out: "Services provided by a person to their employer in the course of their employment". An employee doing your books is not selling you a service, so no PST. An outside bookkeeper is. That is a 7% wedge between in-house and outsourced that did not exist last month. It is not on its own a reason to hire anyone, but if you were already weighing it, the maths moved.

The window that shuts on 30 September

The transitional rule is simple and it is in your favour. If the money is paid or becomes due before 1 October 2026, and the work is finished before 1 December 2026, no PST applies.

The province's own worked example: an invoice paid or due on 15 September for October and November work carries no tax. Its second example is the limit, and you need to know it too. If any of the work runs into December, PST applies to everything attributable to work done from 1 October, so prepaying a whole year does not help you.

So take the things you already know are coming in October or November, the year-end prep, the catch-up on a messy quarter, a tax memo you have been putting off, and ask to be billed for them in September. On $2,500 of work that is $175. Nobody retires on it, and it is free.

The trap pointing the other way

Work done entirely in September and invoiced in October is taxed. The rule keys off when the money is paid or becomes due, not when the work happened.

That catches a very ordinary habit. If your bookkeeper closes September and bills you on the 5th of October, you pay 7% on a month of work that was done before the tax existed. Ask for September's invoice to be dated in September.

An out-of-province bookkeeper does not dodge it

If the work relates to your BC business and nobody charged you PST, you owe it anyway and you have to pay it directly. With a PST number it goes on your return. Without one you file a Casual Remittance Return (form FIN 405) by the end of the month after the money was paid or became due.

Worth knowing before anyone tells you the fix is an Alberta firm or an offshore bookkeeping service. The fix is real only for work that genuinely relates to somewhere other than BC.

Three exemptions worth two minutes

• Work relating outside BC. If part of what you are buying relates to a business, property or activity outside the province, that part is exempt. You give your supplier a reasonable estimate of the split. The province's own example is a chain with 35% of its staff in BC paying tax on 35% of a payroll bill.
• Bought for resale. If you buy accounting work purely to sell on to your own clients, it is exempt, and you charge your client instead.
• Small sellers. Someone with no established business premises and $10,000 or less of gross retail revenue over the previous twelve months, and the same expected for the next twelve, charges no PST. Narrow, but a genuinely part-time bookkeeper can sit inside it.

The line a buyer will care about

Most cost rises are just cost. This one landed on the input that produces your evidence.

Current, reconciled, believable books are what a buyer prices you on and what due diligence tests first. If the reaction to 7% is monthly bookkeeping becomes quarterly, or the reconciliation gets skipped, you have saved a couple of hundred dollars and bought the most expensive thing there is in a sale, which is numbers nobody can rely on. Nobody discounts an offer by 7% of a bookkeeping bill. They discount it by a multiple of the profit they cannot verify.

If you want the standard a buyer is measuring against, it is in clean books for a small business.