Practical guide

Invoice requirements in Canada: the GST/HST rules small businesses actually need

Last updated: July 24, 2026

What an invoice has to show

There is no single federal statute that dictates the layout of a business invoice. What does exist — and what actually shapes invoices in practice — is the CRA's requirement for the information a buyer needs to claim an input tax credit (ITC) for the GST/HST they paid you. If your invoice lacks it, a registered business customer cannot recover the tax, and they will come back and ask.

Those requirements scale with the size of the sale, which is why a $12 receipt and a $12,000 invoice are held to different standards. Broadly:

• Under $30: your business or trading name, the date, and the total amount paid.
• $30 to just under $150: the above, plus your GST/HST registration number and either the amount of GST/HST charged or a clear indication of which items were taxed and at what rate.
• $150 and over:the above, plus the buyer's name or trading name, a description of what was supplied, and your terms of payment.

In practice nobody maintains three invoice formats. Build one that meets the $150-and-over standard and use it for everything. A sensible default includes your business name and address, your GST/HST number if you are registered, a unique invoice number, the issue date, the customer's name, an itemised description with quantities and unit prices, each tax shown as its own line with its rate, the total, and the payment terms and due date.

The unique invoice number deserves a mention because it is the one people improvise. Sequential numbering is not merely tidy — it is how you and the CRA can both tell that nothing is missing from your records. Do not reuse numbers, and do not delete an invoice you have already issued; void it and issue a replacement.

The $30,000 line: when you must register

You are a “small supplier” and not required to register for GST/HST while your worldwide taxable revenues stay at or below $30,000. The threshold is measured on revenue, not profit, and it is not a calendar year figure — that is the part that catches people out. Two separate tests apply:

• Over four consecutive calendar quarters. If your total taxable revenue across any four consecutive quarters exceeds $30,000, you stop being a small supplier. You then have a short grace period before you must charge tax, and registration is required shortly after.
• In a single calendar quarter. If you exceed $30,000 in one quarter alone, you cease to be a small supplier immediately, from the sale that pushed you over. There is no grace period in this case — that supply itself is taxable.

The practical implications are worth stating plainly. First, track a rolling four-quarter total, not a year-to-date one. A business that does $9,000 a quarter is comfortably under $30,000 in any given quarter and over it across four. Second, if you can see the threshold coming, register before you hit it rather than after — backdating an obligation you did not charge for means paying the tax out of revenue you already collected and spent.

Registering voluntarily while still under the threshold is allowed and sometimes worth it, because a registrant can claim ITCs on business purchases. If you buy a lot of taxable inputs — materials, tools, software, a vehicle — the recoverable tax can outweigh the administrative cost. If you mostly sell your own time to consumers, it usually does not.

Which tax you charge, and at what rate

The rate is generally determined by where the customer receives the supply — the “place of supply” — not by where your business is based. A BC contractor working on a property in Ontario is generally in Ontario HST territory for that job.

Three regimes exist side by side. GST only at 5% applies in Alberta and the three territories. HST, a single combined tax, applies in Ontario, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, at rates that differ by province. GST plus a separate provincial taxapplies in British Columbia and Saskatchewan (PST), Manitoba (RST) and Quebec (QST) — two taxes, administered separately, and in Quebec's case by Revenu Québec rather than the CRA.

Provincial rates change with provincial budgets — Nova Scotia's HST rate, for instance, has moved in recent years. Rather than trusting a rate you read in an article, confirm the current figures on the CRA's own GST/HST rate page before you configure your invoicing. Getting it wrong in either direction is a problem: undercharging leaves you owing the difference, and overcharging means refunding customers.

Whichever applies, show each tax as its own line with its rate. A single “tax” line for GST and PST combined is not enough for a customer claiming an ITC, because only the federal portion is recoverable under GST/HST rules.

Zero-rated and exempt are not the same thing

This distinction matters more than its dullness suggests. Zero-rated supplies — basic groceries, prescription drugs, most agricultural products, exports — are taxable at 0%. You charge no tax but you remain in the system and can still claim ITCs on the inputs you bought to produce them. Exempt supplies — most residential rent, many health and dental services, most financial services — are outside GST/HST entirely. You charge nothing and you cannot claim ITCs on related purchases, and exempt revenue does not count toward the $30,000 threshold.

A business that assumes it is exempt when it is actually zero-rated leaves recoverable tax on the table every year. If your output is in either category, that is worth twenty minutes with an accountant once, rather than a guess repeated annually.

Keep the records for six years

The CRA generally requires business records to be kept for six years from the end of the last tax year they relate to. That covers issued invoices, receipts for purchases you claimed ITCs on, and the evidence of what was paid and when. Electronic records are acceptable, and must remain readable for the whole period — a folder of files in a format nothing opens in 2032 is not a record.

The reason this is easier with a system than with a shoebox is not virtue, it is retrieval. Six years of paper is only useful if you can find the one invoice being questioned. Invoices that carry their own payment record — issued date, amount, tax breakdown, and the payment that settled them — are the version of this that survives an actual review.

How PayLeaf handles the mechanical parts

None of the above is difficult; it is just easy to do inconsistently at the end of a long day. PayLeaf handles the mechanical half: branded invoice PDFs carry your business details and your GST/HST registration number, invoice numbers are allocated in sequence, GST and PST are calculated on the subtotal and shown as their own lines at their own rates, and each invoice stores the payment that settled it — so the tax breakdown and the proof of payment are one record rather than two.

What it does not do is decide your tax position for you. Whether you must register, which province's rate applies to a particular job, and whether what you sell is zero-rated or exempt are determinations about your business, and the CRA is the authority on all three. This article is general information to help you ask better questions — for the current rates, thresholds and filing obligations, go to the CRA directly, and for anything that turns on the specifics of your business, ask an accountant.

On the collection side, an invoice that includes a QR pay code tends to get paid sooner than one that ends with bank details, which is a smaller point than tax compliance but a more cheerful one. If you want the fee detail, it is all on the pricing page.