Sales Tax, Calculated on Your Own Registrations
Tax is calculated at checkout from the buyer's location, against your tax registrations on your Stripe account. The buyer sees the tax line before they pay. Every sale can produce a sequential, compliant invoice, and those invoices can file automatically to Xero or QuickBooks as tax at the matching rate rather than as extra revenue. GoCushy is not the merchant of record and does not register anywhere on your behalf. Tax features are part of the Worldwide Tax & Affiliates Pack, an add-on. This post is not tax advice.
Most carts solve tax by taking it off your hands entirely. They become the merchant of record, the sale legally becomes theirs, and your customer's receipt has someone else's name on it. That is a real option and it suits some sellers. It is not what GoCushy does.
GoCushy settles on your own Stripe, PayPal or Airwallex account, and tax follows the money. When a buyer reaches checkout, the tax is calculated from their location against the registrations you hold on your own Stripe account. Not against a pooled account of ours, not against a lookup table we maintain, and not against a guess. If you hold a registration, sales into that jurisdiction are taxed on it. If you do not, that calculation has nothing to run against.
The buyer sees the tax before they pay
The tax line appears at checkout, in front of the buyer, before payment. It is not added silently afterwards and it is not buried in the confirmation email. This sounds like a small thing until you have handled the support ticket from someone who was quoted one number and charged another. Showing the line up front is also what makes the invoice that follows match what the buyer actually agreed to.
Invoices that are numbered, not just issued
A receipt with a total on it is not a tax invoice. In many jurisdictions the document has to carry an invoice number that runs in an unbroken sequence, along with the seller's details, the buyer's details, and the tax broken out separately. GoCushy issues sequential, compliant invoices. The numbering is sequential by design, not as a side effect of how records happen to be created, because that is precisely the property an ad-hoc receipt fails and the property an auditor checks first.
B2B reverse charge, enforced rather than assumed
Cross-border business-to-business sales generally work differently: the seller does not charge VAT or GST, and the buyer accounts for it instead. Reverse charge is implemented and enforced in GoCushy, and a reverse-charge invoice carries its required legend rather than being an ordinary invoice with the tax line quietly set to zero. Whether reverse charge applies to your business, in a given place, given where you are resident and registered, is a question for your accountant. What the software does is apply and document the treatment consistently, on every payment path, once you have set the posture.
Filing as tax, not as revenue
Invoices can file automatically to Xero or QuickBooks. The part I care most about is how they land. Tax is filed as tax, at the matching rate — not as an extra revenue line. That distinction is not cosmetic. Collected tax filed as income overstates your revenue and misstates the return, and it is a mess to unwind months later because every downstream number moved with it.
Because getting this wrong is expensive and getting it silently wrong is worse, the filing path refuses more often than most integrations would:
- If a rate cannot be matched, it refuses to file rather than filing a wrong rate.
- Foreign VAT is treated as a liability, not income, and refuses to file until you nominate a liability account for it.
- An unknown buyer country is never assumed to be domestic.
- A connection you authorised before the current scopes existed is told to reauthorise, rather than failing quietly in the background while you assume the books are current.
Each of those is a decision to stop and ask you rather than to guess. A refusal you can see is recoverable in a minute. A wrong rate that files cleanly for six months is not.
Where the software stops and you start
This is the part I want to state plainly, because tax copy that overpromises is genuinely dangerous. Deciding where you are registered, actually registering there, and filing your returns are yours. GoCushy does not register on your behalf, is not the merchant of record, does not decide your tax position, and does not file your return. It calculates against the registrations you hold, shows the buyer the result before they pay, documents it on a compliant invoice, and delivers that document to your accounting system correctly classified.
That is a narrower promise than "we handle tax for you", and I think it is the honest one for a platform that never touches your money. The trade is straightforward: you keep the customer relationship and the settlement account, and you keep the obligation that comes with them. If you would rather hand the obligation to someone else, a merchant-of-record platform is a legitimate choice and I would rather you make it deliberately. There is more on the mechanics in the docs, and on how tax sits beside subscriptions, affiliates and delivery in use cases.
One note on packaging so nobody is surprised: tax and affiliate features are part of the Worldwide Tax & Affiliates Pack, an add-on, not part of the base offer. Lifetime access to GoCushy itself is $295 one-time, with 0% platform fees on that plan. Nothing in this post is tax advice.