This is not a complaint about Stripe. It is a description of what is on a charge object and what is not, because the gap between those two things is where a New Zealand exporter’s evidence goes missing.
If you sell to someone overseas, that sale is likely a zero-rated export, and Inland Revenue asks you to be able to show the buyer was not a New Zealand resident. Two of the six pieces of evidence it names are the billing address and the device IP address.
Both of those pass through the payment page. The question is what is still there afterwards.
So this is a question about data structures, and it has a checkable answer.
A Stripe charge carries a billing_details object with an address, and that address has a country. The field exists.
It is also nullable, and in Stripe’s own published example of a charge it is null — because address collection is a thing the merchant turns on, not a thing that happens by default. A checkout configured for the shortest possible path to payment does not ask for an address, and a field nobody filled in is empty.
So the first item on Inland Revenue’s list may or may not be present, depending on a configuration choice made by whoever built your checkout, possibly years ago, possibly to improve conversion.
This is the part worth knowing precisely. Look through the fields of a charge and you will not find the buyer’s IP address, because there is not one.
That does not mean Stripe has no idea. It plainly does — Checkout, Elements, Payment Links and the mobile SDKs all capture device information and IP, and browser data can be associated with a payment for fraud scoring. Stripe collects it, and you can see it in the Dashboard on an individual payment if you expand the fraud insights.
What it is not: a field on the sale object, an available column in a normal payments export, or anything that reaches your accounting system. It lives in fraud tooling, on a screen, one payment at a time.
The accurate way to state this is: the evidence is not absent from Stripe, it is unreachable from your own books. That is a narrower claim than “carts don’t capture it”, and unlike that claim it is true.
Stripe is a payments system. It captures IP addresses to stop fraud, and it does that extremely well. Fraud data is deliberately kept close to fraud tooling, which is a sensible design decision and also a privacy-respecting one.
Nothing about that design is aimed at a New Zealand GST return, and there is no reason it should be. New Zealand is a small share of Stripe’s world and this rule is one of thousands it would otherwise have to model.
The mismatch is structural, not anyone’s failure. A global payment processor optimises for the global case; a New Zealand seller has a New Zealand-shaped obligation; nobody in that chain is doing anything wrong, and the evidence still ends up somewhere you cannot get at it.
You do not have to take our word for any of this, and you should not:
The third step is the one that answers the actual question, because the export is what a person reconciling a GST return would work from.
GoCushy sits in front of your own Stripe, PayPal or Airwallex account — the money goes to you, and we are never the merchant of record. What we keep is the order.
On that order we record the buyer’s declared country and the network origin of the checkout, and we keep them for the life of the order, in the same place as the amount and the date. Not in fraud tooling, and not one payment at a time on a screen.
It is a small thing. In most countries it would be an analytics detail nobody would bother writing a page about. Here it is the substantiation for a tax position, which is why we did.
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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