Every rebill is a sale, and every sale needs its invoice

What is a membership, in billing terms?

A membership is a subscription: the card is saved once and every billing cycle creates a new sale — which in New Zealand means a new tax invoice with the GST split out, every cycle, not just at signup. A NZ$49-a-month membership is NZ$42.61 plus NZ$6.39 GST on every single rebill.

That second sentence is the part people miss. The signup gets attention because there is a human at the checkout for it. The eleven rebills that follow in a year happen with nobody watching, and each of them is a real transaction that your books need to account for the same way they accounted for the first.

One limit worth stating early: this only matters once you are GST-registered. Below the registration threshold there is no GST to split, and the invoices are just receipts.

Why does every rebill need its own tax invoice?

Because each charge is its own supply, landing in whatever GST period it happened in. The March rebill belongs to the March return, not to the return that covered the signup. If a member is a business, they will claim the GST back each month and will want the paperwork each month. If anyone ever asks you to reconcile a year of membership revenue, the answer is twelve invoices per member, not one.

The table is boring on purpose. Every row is identical except for one thing you cannot see in it: each rebill mints its own invoice, with its own number, next in sequence after the last invoice the account issued. gocushy does this automatically — the numbering does not restart per member, and no cycle is skipped because a human forgot.

What actually happens each month?

The loop is small and it runs without you. Before each rebill the member gets a reminder that the charge is coming, with a link to update their card or cancel — themselves, without emailing you. Then the charge runs against the saved card, and the invoice for that cycle is issued with the GST split shown.

None of these steps involves you doing anything, which is the point. A hundred members means a hundred reminder emails, a hundred charges, and a hundred invoices a month — a volume of clerical work no one should be doing by hand.

What happens when a card fails?

Cards expire, get replaced after fraud, or simply decline. This is normal at any membership size, and the honest answer is that some months a few charges will fail through no fault of the member’s.

When that happens gocushy runs dunning: the member is told the charge failed and asked to update their card, and the payment retries across a grace window before the subscription is cancelled. A failed charge is a recoverable event, not an instant cancellation — most failures are a stale expiry date, and most are fixed by the member in under a minute once they see the email. The full lifecycle — what counts as active, past due, and cancelled — is described in the subscriptions doc.

No invoice is issued for a failed attempt. Invoices exist for money that actually moved, which is exactly what your accountant would want.

Where does the membership content live?

Wherever it lives now. gocushy is the checkout and the recurring billing — it saves the card, runs the cycle, issues the invoices, and handles the dunning. It is not the place your community, videos, or downloads sit; that stays on whatever platform you already use, and gocushy tells it when someone has paid or stopped paying.

That split is deliberate. Membership platforms come and go, and moving your content should never mean rebuilding your billing history. Keep the two separate and each can change without breaking the other.

If your membership currently issues one invoice at signup and then goes quiet for eleven charges, the trial is a reasonable way to see the difference.

General information about how GoCushy behaves, not tax advice — your accountant knows your circumstances and we do not.