Rental & Tracker Software in Canada

About Rental & Tracker Software

We build rental and tracking software: live GPS and IoT tracking, geofencing, booking, KYC, and billing for businesses that rent out vehicles, bikes, or equipment. This sits on real work. We have built telemetry pipelines and firmware bridges for connected hardware, including an EV cycle's rider app and dashboard and the telemetry behind PlugEV.

What the engagement includes

• GPS and GSM tracker integration
• Device servers for Teltonika, GT06 and AIS 140 trackers
• Live map with real-time asset location
• Geofencing with entry and exit alerts
• Trip history and route playback
• Rental booking app for rider and operator
• KYC, deposits, and damage handling
• UPI and card billing (Razorpay)

GST/HST on rental periods, British Columbia rental levies and PPSA registration in Canadian rental software

A rental contract in Canada is taxed in whichever province the federal place of supply rules point to, and the rules for goods supplied by lease are not the ones a shop checkout uses. The CRA's memorandum on the place of supply of tangible personal property, dated April 2026, treats each lease interval as a separate supply for separate consideration, so every billing period on a contract is a taxable event of its own. Where the arrangement provides continuous possession for no more than three months, the supply is made in the province where the supplier delivers the goods or makes them available, and that is settled once, on the initial delivery, without changing for later intervals under the same arrangement. Where possession is provided for longer, each interval follows the ordinary location of the goods, which the memorandum says is wherever supplier and customer mutually agree it is to be at that time, and that agreement can change part way through a term. A motor vehicle leased for more than three months follows a third rule: the province whose registration laws require it to be registered. A rental yard can meet all three in one week. A compact excavator collected at an Ottawa depot is an Ontario supply even if it spends the whole job across the river in Gatineau, while the same machine delivered by your own truck to the Gatineau site is a Quebec supply, carrying GST rather than Ontario's HST, with QST a separate question again. So the booking stores the pickup or delivery location as a tax fact rather than a dispatch note, the duration agreed at signing decides which rule the invoice applies, a long contract keeps a dated history of its agreed location that each interval's invoice reads, and every vehicle record carries its registration province. Which rules apply to your fleet and your contracts is for your accountant.

British Columbia lays its own sales tax on top, and its lease rules are written around where the goods are and for how many hours. Under the Provincial Sales Tax Act a lessee owes tax on a lease entered into in the province, on goods located there when the lease is made, on goods whose possession or delivery is taken there, and on a vehicle registered for use there. Goods leased outside the province and brought in by a BC resident, or used in BC in the course of a business, are taxed for each rental period in proportion to the hours they spend in the province, and a lessee who paid the main tax can claim a refund for rental periods in which the goods were used outside it. Section 43 then adds $1.50 for each day or portion of a day that a passenger vehicle is leased, unless the lease runs 8 consecutive hours or less or more than 28 consecutive days. That turns the hour of pickup and return into a tax input: a van out from eight in the morning until six at night has crossed the eight hour line, and a monthly rental that comes back on day 28 rather than day 29 is still inside the levy. Section 102 catches equipment supplied with someone to run it. A rental company that bought a machine exempt from tax because it was purchased only for leasing pays tax, on the price the machine would have leased for without an operator, whenever it supplies it with one under an agreement. So a bare crane and a crane with a driver are separate products in the catalogue, contracts record timestamps rather than dates, asset location is logged often enough to support an hours calculation, and the passenger vehicle levy is its own line on a BC invoice. Your accountant confirms how each of these applies to your contracts.

The risk a long rental creates sits less in the invoice than in the customer's insolvency. British Columbia's Personal Property Security Act, whose structure the other common law provinces share in their own statutes, applies to a lease for a term of more than one year even where it secures no obligation, and treats the lessor's interest under one as a purchase money security interest. If that interest is unperfected when the customer goes bankrupt or a judgment creditor has the goods seized, it is not effective against the trustee or the creditor, and the owner is left with a damages claim against the customer instead of the machine. The definition reaches contracts a rental desk thinks of as short: a lease for an indefinite term, a lease of a year or less that can renew so the total may exceed a year, and a short lease under which the customer, with the lessor's consent, keeps substantially uninterrupted possession for more than a year, which becomes one only once that year has passed. A site trailer or a generator on a rolling monthly contract is the textbook case. An interest perfected within 15 days after the customer obtains possession takes priority over the trustee and the seizing creditor, and for serial numbered goods, which the regulations define to include motor vehicles and trailers, with motor vehicle drawn widely enough to take in self-propelled machines built for natural terrain or road work, a registration counts only if it describes the goods by serial number. So the contract carries a flag computed from its term and renewal clause on the day it is signed, a nightly job adds up each customer's uninterrupted possession of each asset and raises the registration well before the year runs out, and the serial number or VIN is a required field on every asset in those classes. Whether a given contract needs a registration, and in which province, is for your own counsel.

How we work with Canadian clients

Two things shape Canadian projects more than anything technical. The first is language: if you serve Quebec, French is a legal requirement rather than a nice addition, and the rules tightened considerably under Bill 96. The French version has to be available on equal terms with the English one, which is a design constraint from the first wireframe rather than a translation task at the end.

The second is anti-spam law. CASL is stricter than most teams expect, and the penalties are real. Consent has to be express or clearly implied, records of it have to be kept, and every commercial message needs a working unsubscribe and accurate sender identification. We build those into the product rather than leaving them to whoever configures the mailing tool later, because that is where the exposure usually sits.

Indicative pricing in CAD

Converted from our published Indian rates and rounded. Exchange rates move, so the figure on your quote is calculated on the day it is issued.

Questions Canadian clients ask

Rental & Tracker Software: common questions

Other markets we work in