“No GST” or “Zero-rated”?

They both charge nothing. That is the trap.

On the invoice, zero-rated and exempt look identical: the GST column says nothing, the total is the total, the client pays what you quoted. Nothing on the document tells you that you have made a decision at all.

The difference is not on the sale. It is on everything you buy.

A zero-rated supply is still a taxable supply. It is taxable at a rate of zero. Because it is taxable, the GST you paid on the things you bought to make it is still recoverable.

An exempt supply is not a taxable supply at all, and the GST on the costs attributable to it stays with you.

The mistake, in the wild

In a public New Zealand discussion of exactly this question, one business owner stated it plainly and confidently:

That is wrong, and it is wrong in the expensive direction. Exporting services is zero-rated, not exempt. You charge nothing and you still claim the GST on your hosting, your laptop, your accountant’s fee and everything else that went into producing the work.

A New Zealand consultant billing entirely offshore who codes those invoices as exempt is quietly writing off the GST on every cost in the business. Nothing warns them. The return balances. It just balances at the wrong number, every quarter, for years.

What about “No GST”?

Most accounting software offers a third option with a name like No GST, GST free, or Not registered. It is not a tax treatment. It is a bucket for lines that sit outside the GST system entirely — a drawing, a transfer between your own accounts, a transaction from before you registered.

Using it for an export gets you the right number on the invoice and the wrong number in the return, because those lines generally do not appear in your total supplies. Zero-rated supplies do. If you are reconciling your return against your revenue and the two never agree, this is a good place to look first.

The exact code names differ between packages, and the mapping from a code name to what actually lands in Box 5 is the kind of thing worth confirming once with whoever prepares your return, rather than inferring from the label.

The decision underneath the decision

Here is the part that makes this more than a bookkeeping tip.

Coding a sale as zero-rated is a position: you are stating that this supply was an export. Inland Revenue’s guidance asks that you be able to show your customer was not a New Zealand resident — either through your existing systems and processes, or with any two pieces of evidence from a short published list.

So the tax code you choose at nine at night is downstream of an evidence question that was settled months earlier, at checkout, by software, without asking you. If nothing kept the billing address and the network origin of that sale, the code is still probably correct — it just has nothing behind it.

That is the whole argument, and it is a modest one. We are not suggesting anyone is coming for you. We are suggesting that the cheapest moment to keep a record is the moment it exists, and that moment has already passed by the time you are picking a tax code.

What GoCushy does about it

GoCushy keeps the buyer’s declared country and the network origin of the checkout on the order, for the life of the order, so the evidence sits with the sale rather than evaporating into a payment processor’s fraud tooling.

It does not choose your tax codes and it does not file your GST return. Those are your accountant’s job and your job respectively, and any checkout that tells you otherwise is overselling.

Correct 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.