Almost every operator arriving in Québec from elsewhere in Canada, or from abroad, collapses two obligations into one and calls it “the Québec rules”. They are two laws, two regulators, two kinds of penalty, and they fail independently. A till that transmits flawlessly to the tax authority can still be sitting under a menu that costs you a language fine, and a beautifully francised menu does nothing for you if the bill was not produced by a certified system.
| Sales recording | Language | |
|---|---|---|
| Regulator | Revenu Québec | Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) |
| What it governs | Every transaction, and the bill you hand the customer | Menus, wine lists, signage, service, software |
| Where it bites | The till and the data it sends | The words printed on the menu and the bill |
What Revenu Québec requires
Québec has had mandatory billing in the restaurant sector for years, originally through a physical sales recording module — the MEV, or SRM in English. That hardware has now been replaced by the WEB-SRM, a cloud service you transmit to. The transition ran from 1 November 2023 and the deadline for restaurant operators to be on a certified sales recording system (SRS) talking to the WEB-SRM was 1 June 2025. Operators who still had a working SRM on 31 May 2025 and had signed an installation contract before 1 June 2025 could claim a three-month extension to 31 August 2025. Both of those windows have closed.
The scope is wider than people expect. Revenu Québec treats restaurants, bars operating under a bar permit, caterers serving banquets and receptions, caterers operating inside a grocery, bakery or pastry shop, and food trucks as restaurant establishments subject to the measures. If you are a QST registrant operating one of those, you must have a certified SRS in good working order, transmit prescribed transaction data — including revisions, cancellations and corrections — and give every customer a bill produced by that system. The bill is not on request. Case law on this point is blunt: the bill must be handed over without delay, not only when a customer asks for it.
Penalties are not theoretical. Revenu Québec applies a penalty per bill not given, and the statute behind the regime carries fines that run from a few thousand dollars into six figures, with the possibility of imprisonment for the serious offences. You should read the current penalty schedule on Revenu Québec’s own site rather than take a vendor’s summary of it, including ours.
Two practical consequences. First, you cannot change point of sale in Québec the way you change it anywhere else, because it is the system itself that must be certified, not your configuration of it. Second, the bill now carries a QR code generated through the WEB-SRM that a customer can scan to view the transaction, so the receipt layout is not yours to redesign freely.
What the Charter requires
The Charter of the French Language, reformed by Bill 96 (Loi 14), covers restaurants directly. Section 51 requires inscriptions on products to be in French, and it applies expressly to menus and wine lists. A translation is allowed; what is not allowed is giving the other language greater prominence than French or making it available on more favourable terms. Since 1 June 2022 businesses have also had to respect the consumer’s right to be informed and served in French. Since 1 June 2025, where a non-French trademark appears on public signage visible from outside the premises, French must be markedly predominant in the same visual field — in practice roughly twice the space. The Charter also expects software to be available in French where a French version exists, which reaches your ordering screens, not only your menu card.
Fines under the Charter for a legal person generally run in the range of several thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, doubled for a second offence and tripled after that, and each day of continuing non-compliance can count as a separate offence. Complaints to the OQLF are the usual trigger.
Where the two meet on one printer
On the receipt. Québec charges GST at 5% and QST at 9.975%, printed as separate lines, and the wording on those lines should match what Revenu Québec uses. The same slip has to read in French, with accented characters rendering properly — a thermal printer set to the wrong code page turns crème brûlée into rubble, which is the same class of problem as receipts printing boxes instead of local script. Your kitchen may work in another language entirely; that is a separate display layer and does not excuse the customer-facing one. For the registration and filing side — QST and GST numbers, returns, what a new establishment has to do first — our sister site yunyafx.com goes into more depth than we can here.
What we will not tell you
That MiYaDine is certified for Québec. Certification is a published fact, not a sales claim, and the only safe way to buy in this province is to ask any vendor for the certification and check it against Revenu Québec’s own list before signing anything. Ask us in writing what we support in Québec and we will answer in writing. The language side we can help with at the menu and interface level; the tax recording side is a yes-or-no you should verify yourself.
Checked against the sources named above on 2026-09-20. Rules and platform terms change — confirm anything tax-related with a local accountant before you rely on it.
