It is the most-asked GST question in New Zealand, and the answer is usually no. The part worth reading is the second half: what Inland Revenue asks you to be able to show, and how often that gets described incorrectly.
If you are supplying a service to someone who is not a New Zealand resident, and they are outside New Zealand when you supply it, that is an exported service. Exported services are zero-rated: you charge 15% of nothing, which is to say you charge no GST.
That covers the ordinary case — a consultant in Wellington invoicing a client in Melbourne, a course sold to a buyer in Texas, a design job for a company in Singapore.
Most people stop reading here, which is fair, because that genuinely is the answer to the question they asked. The rest of this page is about the obligation that comes attached to it.
Here is the relevant guidance in full, from Inland Revenue’s page on zero-rated supplies, under the heading Providing remote services to non-residents:
“To zero-rate the services, you need to be able to show that your customer is not a New Zealand resident. You can use your current systems or processes to confirm your customer’s residency, or you can use any 2 of the following pieces of evidence”.
The list that follows it is:
That is the entire published guidance on the point. It runs to about a hundred and twenty words. There is nothing in it about what format to keep the evidence in, nothing about how long to keep it, and no template.
You will find plenty of pages stating that Inland Revenue requires two pieces of evidence. Read the sentence again. It says you can use your existing systems or processes, or you can use any two from the list.
That is an accommodation, not a requirement. It offers an alternative route first — your own systems — and then provides a safe harbour for people who would rather have something concrete to point at.
We are being pedantic about one word on purpose. The difference between “required” and “can” is the difference between a rule you are breaking and a rule that is trying to help you, and a lot of anxious reading of tax guidance comes from summaries that quietly tighten the original.
It is also worth saying plainly: this is not a common cause of trouble. In public New Zealand discussions of this exact question you will find practitioners reporting thirteen and twenty years of zero-rated exporting without ever being asked about it. We are not going to pretend otherwise in order to sell you something.
The first two items on Inland Revenue’s list — billing address, and the device IP address or another geolocation method — are precisely the two things that exist at the moment somebody pays you, and precisely the two things most checkouts discard immediately afterwards.
They are not secret or difficult. They passed through the payment page. The issue is that a year later they are not in your accounting system, not in your payment exports, and not sitting next to the return that relied on them.
So the honest version of the problem is not “nobody captures this”. It is that the information is captured somewhere in the payment stack and is not reachable from your own books, which is a different and more annoying situation.
Zero-rating is not a blanket rule about anyone with a foreign address, and it is worth knowing the edges:
Whether a particular sale of yours is properly zero-rated depends on what you sold, to whom, and where they were. That is a question for your accountant.
GoCushy records the buyer’s declared country and the network origin of the checkout against every order, and keeps them for the life of the order. Those are the first two items on Inland Revenue’s list, kept where you can actually find them.
We did not build that because a customer asked. We built it because we are a New Zealand company selling software to people who are mostly not in New Zealand, which makes our own sales exported services, which means we have to be able to show the same thing. The feature existed before the marketing page did.
What the software cannot do is decide your tax position, and we will not claim it does. It records what happened. Whether that adds up to a zero-rated supply is your accountant’s call, and the point of keeping the record is that they have something to look at when they make it.
Start a 30-day trialCorrect as at 19 August 2026, and checked against Inland Revenue’s published guidance on that date. GST rules change and this is general information about how software records things — it is not tax advice about your circumstances. Your accountant knows those; we do not.
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