Price one bill for HST, PST and QST

For every province the work touches, settle whether the provincial tax on materials is recoverable in your position or a cost you carry, and write the decision down before a single rate is entered.

Why: This one decision moves the tax between two completely different places in the estimate. Getting it wrong does not produce a wrong total, it produces a right total built the wrong way, which passes review cleanly and then fails at the first cost report when the recovery nobody was entitled to does not arrive.

Where the provincial tax on materials is a cost you never recover, build it into the material rate in the catalog rather than adding it at the end, and note on the rate that it is tax inclusive so the next reader knows.

Why: A tax you do not get back is simply part of what the material costs you, and every rate built without it understates the job by the tax on your largest cost line. Putting it on the tail instead makes it look recoverable to everybody who reads the estimate after you, including the person who prepares the cost plan.

Add the recoverable tax as a line on the tail at the rate for the province, and where two taxes run in parallel add both of them on the same pre-tax subtotal rather than one on top of the other's result.

Why: Stacking one tax on a figure that already includes the other is a small percentage of the whole contract, which is more than the margin on most of it. The province decides the base as much as it decides the rate, and a build-up showing which base was used is the difference between a client checking your tax in a glance and a client checking it with their accountant.

Write into the basis of estimate the rate used for each province, the date that rate took effect, the authority that publishes it, and which side of the pre-tax line each one was computed on.

Why: Rates move, and a bid priced last quarter was priced under the rate in force then. Nova Scotia went from 15 to 14 percent on 1 April 2025, and an estimate that cannot say which of the two it used cannot be defended in either direction when the question comes up nine months later.

Report the same scope priced for each province, keeping the tax that sits inside the rates separate from the tax on the tail, so the difference reads as a location rather than as a total.

Why: Three totals tell a client nothing they could not get from a rate table. Showing that the money is inside the rate in one province and on the tail in another is what explains why the same building costs what it costs across a border, and that is the conversation that wins the work rather than the number.