Selling into Canada turns GST/HST on at a CAD 30,000 line

The workload

A foreign SaaS seller with Canadian customers has to do one thing before it has to do anything else: separate its Canadian sales into two piles. One pile is sales to a 'specified Canadian recipient,' the Canada Revenue Agency's term, defined on its digital-economy definitions page, for a recipient who has not provided proof of being registered under the normal GST/HST regime and whose usual place of residence is in Canada. The other pile is everything else, including sales to a GST/HST-registered Canadian business. Verified, from the CRA's own definition: only the first pile counts toward a CAD 30,000 registration threshold. Below that line the workload is bookkeeping. Above it, per the CRA's guidance on who needs to register, it becomes applying for the simplified GST/HST regime, charging tax at the rate tied to each customer's province, and remitting it on the CRA's schedule.

What the documents show

Verified: the CRA's guidance states plainly that measures for digital-economy businesses, including cross-border digital products and services, took effect 1 July 2021. Verified: the registration question is framed as a single test, whether the registration threshold exceeds CAD 30,000, applied over a rolling period the CRA's threshold-calculation guidance covers separately from the page cited here. Verified: the CRA offers the simplified regime to sellers of digital products and services and of platform-based accommodation, but states the simplified regime is not available to a non-resident seller of qualifying goods, who must use normal registration instead. A single business selling both software and a physical add-on can face two different registration paths under the same reform.

The operating cost

The CRA does not publish a percentage fee for the simplified regime; the cost is the GST/HST rate that already applies in each Canadian province, applied to sales the seller must now classify correctly by recipient. What the registration page does confirm, verified, is that a simplified registrant receives a business number once the CRA validates the application, and that registrants may elect to calculate net tax in a qualifying foreign currency, U.S. dollars or euros. Where the documents are silent, on how a solo founder should build a registration check into checkout, this entry supplies no answer the CRA has not given.

The stop condition

Editorial: the obligation does not end on its own. A seller that drops back under CAD 30,000 of specified-Canadian-recipient sales may cease to be required to register, but nothing in the guidance cited here states an automatic deregistration date; that step, like registration itself, is an action the seller takes.

• What share of last year's Canadian revenue was billed to an unregistered individual rather than a GST/HST-registered business?
• Does the checkout flow capture and verify a Canadian business customer's GST/HST registration number before treating the sale as excluded from the threshold?
• Is the threshold period being tracked on a rolling basis, or only checked once a year?

None of this is a judgment on Canada's tax policy; it describes a line the CRA drew in 2021 and the bookkeeping a foreign seller needs to cross it correctly either way.