Tax, Done Right on Your Own Account: Stripe Tax, EU & UK VAT, NZ & AU GST
Because the money settles on your own Stripe, tax settles there too. Stripe Tax runs against your registrations at checkout, charges the right rate for the buyer's location, and every sale can produce a sequential, compliant invoice you can file to Xero. That's live today. Smarter per-region tax modes — including automatic B2B reverse charge — are on the roadmap as part of the Worldwide Tax & Affiliates Pack.
Tax is the part of selling online that quietly turns into a mess. The moment you sell across a border, you're dealing with VAT in the EU and UK, GST in New Zealand and Australia, registration thresholds, and invoices that have to be numbered in an unbroken sequence to be valid. Most tools handle this by becoming the merchant of record — they take on the tax, and in exchange they take a cut of every sale and stand between you and your customer.
GoCushy takes the other road. Your money is on your own Stripe, so your tax is calculated against your own registrations, on your own account. Here's how that actually works, and where it's headed.
Stripe Tax, on your own registrations — live today
When a buyer reaches checkout, Stripe Tax computes the correct tax for their location against the registrations you hold in your Stripe account. If you're registered for EU VAT through OSS, EU buyers see the right VAT for their country. Registered for UK VAT? UK buyers are charged UK VAT. NZ and AU GST work the same way. The rate isn't guessed on our side and it isn't hard-coded — it's Stripe's tax engine running on your account, at the moment of sale.
The key phrase is your own registrations. GoCushy doesn't collect tax on your behalf into a pool. You remain the seller of record, you file where you're registered, and Stripe Tax gives you the numbers to do it. Where you need to register is a question for your accountant — this is product information, not tax advice.
Sequential, compliant invoices — live today
A tax invoice isn't just a receipt with a total on it. In most VAT and GST regimes it needs a sequential invoice number with no gaps, the seller's details, the buyer's details, and the tax broken out correctly. GoCushy generates exactly that for every sale — a sequential, compliant invoice, numbered in order, with the tax Stripe calculated shown properly.
And because the paperwork is only useful if it reaches your books, invoices can flow through to Xero. That closes the loop from checkout to filing without you re-keying anything. If you want to see where this fits alongside subscriptions, affiliates, and delivery, the use cases page walks through it.
The global picture
Here's the shape of it across the four regions most cross-border sellers deal with:
- EU VAT: Stripe Tax charges the buyer's country rate against your OSS or local registration; the invoice carries the correct VAT breakdown.
- UK VAT: UK buyers charged UK VAT against your UK registration.
- NZ GST: 15% for New Zealand buyers when you're registered here.
- AU GST: 10% for Australian buyers against your AU registration.
In every case the calculation is Stripe's, the registration is yours, and the invoice is generated to match. Nothing about that requires GoCushy to touch your money or become the seller.
What's coming: per-region tax modes
There's one important thing today's setup doesn't yet do automatically, and I want to be straight about it. If you sell business-to-business across borders, you often shouldn't charge tax at all — the buyer accounts for it themselves under reverse charge. Handling that cleanly, per region, with proper validation of the buyer's tax number, is not shipped yet.
It's on the roadmap as part of the optional Worldwide Tax & Affiliates Pack: per-region tax modes that let you charge everyone, or switch a region to business-only with automatic reverse charge and the right invoice wording. We wrote a whole post on that problem and how we're approaching it — see Reverse Charge for B2B, Without the Headache. For now, treat reverse charge as coming, not here.
What is here today is solid: real tax at checkout on your own registrations, and compliant sequential invoices you can file. That already covers the large majority of sellers.
Founding member: fee-free for life.
Opens Tuesday, July 28, 2026. $195 one-time locks in lifetime access and 0% GoCushy platform fees for life — you still pay only Stripe's standard rate. Limited to 200 seats. The advanced per-region tax modes ship in the optional Worldwide Tax & Affiliates Pack, +$95.
See the founding offerFounding invites go out in order. No spam — launch updates and your invite, that's it.
Tax that settles on your own account, invoices that stand up to an audit, and a clear roadmap for B2B. Start on the founding offer.
