You sell a course to someone in Sydney. That is an exported service and it is zero-rated, so you do not charge 15% GST. Simple enough. The difficult part arrives about two years later, when someone asks you to demonstrate it.
Everything that proves where your buyer was existed briefly, during checkout, and then stopped existing. The billing address they typed. Where the request actually came from. What their card issuer said about the card.
If your checkout kept those, you have a position you can defend. If it kept only an email address and an amount, you have an assertion.
A billing address on its own is weak, because anyone can type any address. That is precisely why more than one independent indicator is expected: two weak signals that agree are worth considerably more than one strong-looking one.
This never surfaces while things are going well. It surfaces during a review, or when an accountant new to your file asks a reasonable question about a run of zero-rated sales, and the honest answer is that the information was never captured.
And it cannot be reconstructed. You cannot go back to an order from 2024 and work out whether that buyer was in Auckland or Adelaide. Whatever the checkout stored is what you have, forever.
If you have been selling offshore for a couple of years through a cart that captured nothing beyond a billing address, that is worth a conversation with your accountant now, at a time of your choosing, rather than later at a time of someone else’s.
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.
That is not a feature we would have bothered to advertise in most countries — it reads like an analytics detail. In New Zealand it is the substantiation for a tax position, which is a different thing entirely.
It is also the sort of thing a product only does if the people building it file GST themselves. We do, which is why it was there before anyone asked for it.
Capturing evidence is not the same as being right. GoCushy records what happened; whether a particular sale is properly zero-rated depends on what you sold, to whom, and where they actually were. That is a question for your accountant, who knows your circumstances.
What we can do is make sure that when they ask, the answer exists.
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