Why We Opened Invio in Australia
Invio started in New Zealand. Here's what actually changed to open it up properly in Australia - GST, ABN, BAS, and a partner who knows the market.
Invio started as a New Zealand product, built for New Zealand sole traders and tradies stuck between a spreadsheet and an accounting suite three sizes too big. This year we opened it up to Australia too, and it's worth being honest about what that actually involved, because "just support another country" undersells it. Australia is not New Zealand with different postage stamps. The tax machinery underneath an invoice is genuinely different, and getting that wrong is exactly the kind of mistake that costs a tradie money or costs an accountant's trust in the tool.
Why Australia
The problem Invio solves - admin eating into the hours you should be billing for - isn't a New Zealand-specific problem. It's the same shape across the Tasman: sole traders and small trade businesses who need invoices out fast, GST handled correctly, and payments chased without doing it by hand manually. Australia is a much bigger market with exactly that same shape, which made it the obvious next step once the New Zealand product was solid.
What it isn't is a market we know from the inside. New Zealand's rules are the ones we've lived with. Australia's are not, and pretending otherwise in a product that touches other people's tax obligations is how you end up shipping something confidently wrong. So opening in Australia meant finding someone who actually operates there, not reading ATO pages from Auckland and hoping for the best.
In Australia, Invio operates in partnership with Future Impact AI, a registered business name of Project Manage IT Pty Ltd (ABN 14 674 934 877). Invio itself hasn't changed what it is or who runs it: Invio remains a New Zealand business - Bakhtiyar Duganov trading as Invio - and every subscription, Australian customers included, is still sold and billed by Invio in New Zealand. Future Impact AI is the partner who brought local Australian market knowledge to this; they are not a second seller, and there is no separate "Invio Australia" company behind this.
What actually had to change
Once we started building the Australian side properly, rather than just translating the New Zealand one, the list of things that don't carry over got long fast:
- GST is 10%, not 15% - and pulling GST back out of a GST-inclusive total uses a different fraction: one eleventh in Australia, three twenty-thirds in New Zealand. Get the wrong one and every invoice total is wrong.
- An ABN is not a GST number - you can hold an ABN without being GST-registered, and you can't register for GST without one, but they're not interchangeable the way a New Zealand GST number is simply your IRD number. Invio needed a dedicated ABN field, not a relabelled GST-number box.
- A BAS, not a GST return - Australian businesses lodge a Business Activity Statement with the ATO, not a return with IRD.
- Tax invoice rules differ structurally, not just in the numbers - the ATO requires a tax invoice above A$82.50, and the buyer's identity above A$1,000. The ATO's own list of required fields doesn't even include a sequential invoice number, which surprised us given how central that is to New Zealand practice.
- BSB and account number, not a bank account number on its own - Australian bank details need a BSB, which New Zealand banking doesn't use at all.
- A different registration threshold - Australia's GST registration threshold is A$75,000 in a rolling 12 months, against New Zealand's NZ$60,000. Both give you 21 days to register once you cross it, which is one of the few things that actually lines up.
None of that is a find-and-replace job. Each one needed its own field, its own validation, and its own honest answer about what applies and what doesn't.
What we didn't fake
One example of taking that seriously: Invio's Australian prices don't say "incl. GST" the way our New Zealand prices do. That's not an oversight - Invio isn't registered for GST in Australia yet, so adding GST to a price we're not collecting would be a false statement about our own business, not just a rounding choice. It will change once we cross that threshold ourselves, and not a day before.
Card payments work for Australian businesses too, alongside bank transfer, so getting paid doesn't depend on which side of the Tasman a client's bank is on.
What stays the same
The product underneath is the same one we built for New Zealand: simple invoicing, correct tax handling, automated reminders, recurring billing, and pricing that fits a sole trader rather than a 50-person accounting department. Opening in Australia didn't mean building a second product. It meant refusing to let the first one paper over a country it didn't actually understand yet.
If you're an Australian sole trader or tradie tired of admin eating into billable hours, see what Invio does or head straight to pricing - the free plan covers up to 5 invoices a month, no credit card required. For the detail behind the Australian-specific rules above, the ABN invoicing guide and the tax invoice requirements guide go deeper than this post does.