Trade coaching has quietly become a real New Zealand niche: builders teaching builders how to price jobs, sparkies selling apprentice study programmes, plumbers packaging the quoting system that took them ten years to work out. The selling part is ordinary digital commerce, with one wrinkle — your buyers are businesses, and they will claim the GST back.
A tradesperson selling training online — a pricing course, a quoting system, an apprentice programme — needs the same two things as any digital seller in New Zealand: a checkout that takes the money into their own account, and invoices their bookkeeper can file. A NZ$1,200 course sold to a GST-registered buyer is NZ$1,043.48 plus NZ$156.52 GST, on a tax invoice that carries the buyer's name.
The course itself can live wherever suits you — a course platform, a members area, a folder of videos behind a login. GoCushy is the checkout that sits in front of it: it takes the payment, produces the invoice, and triggers delivery. It is not a learning platform and it does not host your videos. That division of labour matters, because the checkout is where the tax paperwork either gets done properly on every sale, or does not get done at all.
If you were selling a hobby course to salaried buyers, the receipt would be a formality. That is not who buys trade training. The people paying NZ$1,200 to fix their pricing are running trade businesses, most of them GST-registered, and a registered buyer intends to claim the NZ$156.52 back on their next return.
They can only do that if the document you give them meets Inland Revenue’s requirements for taxable supply information. So a compliant tax invoice is not optional politeness — it is the thing that lets your buyer claim, and it is what their accountant will ask for. Sellers who forward a bare card receipt and hope for the best get the same follow-up message, one buyer at a time: can you send me a proper invoice.
The same arithmetic applies on your side of the sale. A coach selling NZ$1,200 courses crosses the NZ$60,000 registration threshold at fifty sales a year, so most trade coaches are registered themselves and need their own output GST recorded per sale. If you are under the threshold and unregistered, none of this applies to you yet — you charge no GST and issue no tax invoices — but at these prices the threshold arrives quickly.
GST-inclusive pricing works backwards from the number on the page. A NZ$1,200 course is NZ$1,043.48 for the course plus NZ$156.52 of GST, and the two add back to NZ$1,200.00 exactly. GoCushy does that arithmetic in cents on every sale, so the invoice never disagrees with the advertised price by a rounding step.
There is one extra requirement at this price. Once a single sale goes over NZ$1,000, the taxable supply information has to identify the buyer: their name, plus at least one identifier — and an email address qualifies. A checkout already collects a name and an email in the ordinary course of taking payment, so the requirement costs nothing extra; the details just have to make it onto the document. The full field list is in what GoCushy puts on a tax invoice.
Most trade training has an obvious companion product: the quoting spreadsheet, the contract template, the pricing calculator the course teaches from. A NZ$180 template pack offered on the same checkout as an order bump appears on the invoice as its own line — NZ$156.52 plus NZ$23.48 of GST, NZ$180.00 in total — alongside the course’s line. The buyer pays NZ$1,380 in one transaction, receives one document, and their bookkeeper files one thing.
The limit worth knowing: an order bump is a tick-box at the checkout, not a sales page. It works for a NZ$180 add-on because nobody needs persuading at that price, and it would be the wrong tool for selling a second NZ$1,200 course.
GoCushy is the checkout layer. The payment settles into your own Stripe or PayPal account in New Zealand dollars; the tax invoice is generated with the splits above and the buyer’s details on it; delivery fires when the money clears. The plan is 99 a month including GST — 86.09 excluding — and the invoice we send you for it follows the same rules this post describes, because your checkout fee is a business expense too.
What it does not do: host your course videos, mark your apprentices’ work, or file your GST return. It produces the documents that make the filing routine, and hands them to whoever does it.
If the course is ready and the checkout is the missing piece, the trial is long enough to run a real sale through it before you commit.
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