Questions, answered plainly

They're completely separate, and mixing them up is the single most common confusion.

GST is not your money. You add 15% to what you charge, collect it on the government's behalf, and pass it on. You also claim back the GST you paid on business purchases. Every period you send IRD the difference.

Income tax is a share of your profit. After you take your expenses off your income, what's left is profit — and IRD takes a percentage of that.

So one is a tollbooth you collect at, the other is a cut of what you actually made. They're worked out separately, filed separately, and paid at different times.

Because they measure different things. GST is charged on your sales — you owe it even in a month you made no profit at all. Income tax only applies to profit, so if you haven't made any yet, it's zero.

A brand new business commonly owes GST and no income tax. That combination is normal, not a mistake.

Usually no. Services sold to someone who is outside New Zealand when you do the work are zero-rated — 0% GST.

Switch on “Zero-rated · no GST” when you create the invoice. The total stays exactly what you charge, and it still appears on your GST return in the right box.

The good part: you still claim back GST on the New Zealand expenses behind that work, which often puts you in a refund position.

The line is $1,000 excluding GST.

Under that, log it as an expense and claim it all at once. Over it, add it as an asset and Bloomly spreads the cost across several years as depreciation.

Watch the “excluding GST” part — a $1,150 sticker price is only $1,000 once GST is stripped out. If you enter something under the threshold as an asset, Bloomly tells you.

IRD splits 2-monthly filers into two staggered groups, and Bloomly needs to know which one you're in.

Go to Settings → GST filing cycle. Category A covers Jan–Feb, Mar–Apr, May–Jun. Category B covers Feb–Mar, Apr–May, Jun–Jul. Check a past return or myIR if you're not sure, then pick the one that matches.

Provisional tax is paying next year's income tax in advance, in three instalments, once your annual tax bill goes over $5,000. It isn't an extra tax — just the same tax, earlier.

Terminal tax is the balancing payment. When the year is done and your real profit is known, terminal tax is whatever is left after your instalments. If you overpaid, you get a refund.

Save the invoice, then use the Send this invoice panel: download the PDF, then open a ready-written email with the customer, amount and due date already filled in. Attach the PDF and send.

Bloomly doesn't send it for you. That's deliberate — the invoice arriving from your own address is far less likely to be treated as spam than mail sent on your behalf.

Through the Bank feed, not invoices. Import your bank CSV, then categorise the money coming in as Sales income (a New Zealand sale, which carries GST) or Sales income · zero-rated (an export to an overseas customer, which doesn't).

That's the whole record of the sale. You never have to create an invoice in Bloomly for money a payment processor already billed and collected — and you never enter customers one by one. For GST you report totals, not individual sales.

Because one payout can be both. A sale to a New Zealand customer carries 15% GST. A sale to someone overseas is zero-rated — it still counts as income and still appears on your return, in Box 6, but carries no GST.

If a single payment mixes the two, split it into two lines with the right amount against each. Guessing one category for the whole lot either charges GST you didn't collect or hides GST you did.

Payment processors take their fee before paying you. If a customer pays $19 and Stripe keeps $0.85, your bank sees $18.15 — but your sale was $19, and that's the figure your GST return needs.

So don't simply tick the payout. Take the gross totals from your processor's own reports — split by customer country — enter those, and record the fees separately as an expense. Ticking the payout as-is understates both your income and your GST.

Ticking the amount that arrived is right where the full amount lands: EFTPOS, a direct bank transfer, cash banked.

Three entries, however many customers you have:

1. Your NZ sales total for the month → Sales income
2. Your overseas sales total → Sales income · zero-rated
3. The processor's fees → an expense

The numbers get bigger as you grow. The amount of work doesn't. If you use Stripe, turning on Stripe Tax gets you that country split as a report instead of sorting it by hand.

No. If a bank credit is matched to an invoice, Bloomly ignores it when totalling bank sales — the invoice already counted that money. Only unmatched credits with a sales category are added, so the two ways of recording income can be used side by side without double-counting.

No. Bloomly works out every figure and shows you which box each one goes in — you enter them in myIR and pay.

It isn't a registered tax agent and has no access to your myIR account. Marking a return as “filed” in Bloomly is a note for your own records; it doesn't send anything to IRD.

For a lot of straightforward sole traders and small companies, yes — that's exactly who it's built for.

But Bloomly is software, not someone who knows your situation. If you have anything unusual — trusts, shareholder salaries, mixed-use assets, an IRD dispute — talk to a chartered accountant. Bloomly keeps your books tidy either way, which makes their job cheaper.

Settings → Download a backup gives you everything — business details, invoices, payments, expenses, bank lines and returns — as a single file, any time.

Worth doing periodically regardless: IRD requires you to keep business records for seven years, and you shouldn't rely on any one system as your only copy.