Do You Charge GST/HST to a US Client? For Creatives, One Clause Decides

The letter arrives with a heading that sounds almost polite. We have completed our examination of the information available and are proposing changes to your GST/HST return. Then the number. On roughly $98,000 of work invoiced to a single American brand (work the studio had confidently zero-rated, because the client is in the United States), the auditor proposed $14,700 of HST. At 15%. On sales that were nearly two years old, to a client who had long since paid and moved on.

Nobody had done anything careless. The invoices were clean, the contract was signed, the client was unmistakably a US corporation. The problem was a rule that almost nobody in the creative industries knows exists: the export exemption you are relying on has a condition attached to it, and the condition is about your client's Canadian tax status, not their address.

Read on for the two-branch test that decides your exposure, why the assessment lands at 15% instead of 5%, the contract wording that puts you on one branch or the other, and the two-line email that ends the argument before it starts.

Exporting is tax-free, right up until it isn't

Ask a working photographer, illustrator, designer, or production studio whether they charge GST/HST on a job for an overseas client and you'll get the same answer nearly every time: no, it's an export. That instinct is mostly right, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. Canada does not want to export its own sales tax, so the Excise Tax Act contains a long list of supplies to non-residents that are zero-rated: taxable at 0%, meaning you charge nothing but still recover the GST/HST on your own gear, software, studio rent, and assistants.

That last part matters, and it's why zero-rating is a good outcome rather than a neutral one. But zero-rating is a set of specific statutory provisions with specific conditions, not a general principle that foreign money is untaxed. Miss a condition and the supply doesn't become slightly wrong. It becomes fully taxable, at a rate you never collected, funded out of your own margin.

Source: Excise Tax Act, Schedule VI, Part V ("Exports"), the zero-rating provisions for supplies to non-residents. See also Zero-Rated vs. Exempt for why the difference protects your input tax credits.

Your licence is a supply made in Canada

Before you can ask whether a supply is zero-rated, you have to establish that it's in the Canadian system at all. For intangible personal property (the legal category that holds copyright, trademarks, and licences to use them), the Act uses a deliberately wide net:

A supply of intangible personal property is deemed to be made in Canada if the property may be used in whole or in part in Canada.

Source: Excise Tax Act, s. 142(1)(c)(i).

Read that again, because the operative word is may. Not "is used in Canada." Not "was used in Canada." May be used. If you grant a worldwide licence to a set of photographs, those images may be used in Canada, and that possibility is baked into the word "worldwide." The supply is therefore made in Canada, and it doesn't matter that the client is headquartered in Manhattan, that the shoot happened in a Brooklyn studio, or that the campaign never ran north of the border. The capacity for Canadian use is enough.

There is a mirror provision, and it's the most underused planning tool in this whole area. A supply of intangible personal property is deemed to be made outside Canada if the property may not be used in Canada. A licence that expressly carves Canada out of its territory is, on the face of the statute, outside the Canadian GST/HST system entirely. No zero-rating analysis is required, because there's nothing to analyze.

Source: Excise Tax Act, s. 142(2)(c)(i).

That's a real lever, but it's a commercial decision before it's a tax one. A US brand paying for a global campaign will not accept a licence that excludes a market it sells into. Don't reach for it as a tax trick. Reach for it when the licence genuinely was regional in the first place, and make sure the paperwork says so.

Two export rules, and only one of them cares about your client's tax number

Here is the part that catches people, and it's visible only if you read the export provisions side by side. Part V of Schedule VI zero-rates a long list of supplies to non-residents. Some of those provisions attach a condition about the recipient's GST/HST registration. Some don't. And the split is not intuitive.

Services to a non-resident are zero-rated under section 7, and that provision says nothing whatsoever about registration. It carves out a handful of situations: services rendered to an individual while they're in Canada, services relating to Canadian real property, services in respect of tangible personal property situated in Canada, acting as the non-resident's agent, transportation, telecommunications, and advisory or consulting or professional services. Advisory, consulting, and professional services then get their own zero-rating provision in section 23, which also says nothing about registration. So for most service work, a foreign client's Canadian tax number is simply irrelevant.

Intellectual property is a different story. Section 10 zero-rates a supply of "an invention, patent, trade secret, trademark, trade-name, copyright, industrial design or other intellectual property or any right, licence or privilege to use any such property," but only "where the recipient is a non-resident person who is not registered" for GST/HST at the time the supply is made.

Source: Excise Tax Act, Schedule VI, Part V: s. 7 (services), s. 10 (intellectual property), s. 23 (advisory, professional and consulting services).

That clause is the whole article. If your foreign client happens to hold a GST/HST number, section 10 doesn't apply to them, no other provision picks up the slack, and your licence is an ordinary taxable supply made in Canada.

It's worth seeing the pattern laid out, because "does registration matter?" is the only question you need to answer about any given provision:

Notice that advertising services sit on the wrong side of that line too. A Canadian studio producing an ad campaign for a registered foreign brand is squarely in the same trap, without any copyright licence involved.

Twelve photography jobs, and whether tax belongs on the invoice

The provisions are easier to hold onto once you attach them to actual work. Here are twelve jobs a working photographer might invoice in a year. The currency on the invoice is deliberately not a column, because it is not part of any test. You can bill a Toronto magazine in US dollars and a Berlin agency in Canadian dollars, and neither fact moves the answer.

A pattern falls out of the taxable rows. Almost every one of them turns on something that was physically in Canada, a person, a product, a building, or on a client who holds a tax number. The rows that zero-rate are pure service to a foreign business with nothing of theirs sitting on Canadian soil.

But notice which provision those physical-presence rows are actually about. Every one of them is a carve-out from section 7, and section 7 governs services. Section 10 has no equivalent. It contains no exception for a product sitting in your studio, no exception for a client who flew in, no exception for a building. Its only conditions are that the recipient is a non-resident and not registered. So the exclusions photographers worry about most live on the branch where the client's tax number is irrelevant, and they are absent from the branch where that number decides everything. Which branch you are standing on is settled by your contract, not by where the product was.

Now the part photographers get wrong most often, which is why the last three rows are written the way they are. Ask a photographer to describe a shoot for a foreign brand and you will usually hear a service: they flew in, they shot, they delivered the files. No rights mentioned, because none felt like they changed hands. But since 2012, when the commissioned works rule was repealed, commissioning a photograph does not transfer its copyright. You own it as the author. Which means a client running those images in a campaign is not simply buying your afternoon. They are buying permission, and permission is intellectual property.

Source: Copyright Act, s. 13(1). Former s. 13(2), which gave commissioned photographs to the client, was repealed by S.C. 2012, c. 20, s. 7.

So the shoot with genuinely no rights attached is rarer than it feels. Retouching someone else's files qualifies. Assisting qualifies. A commission that ends with a client posting your photographs does not, and the licence buried inside it is tested under section 10, where their tax number decides the answer.

That is what makes a single undifferentiated line on the invoice dangerous rather than merely untidy. Two supplies are sitting inside it, a fee and a licence, and they can land on opposite sides. Worse, CRA is not obliged to accept your split at all: where elements are so bound together that one loses its separate identity, the whole thing is a single supply taxed according to its predominant element. On a campaign commission, that element is the rights.

Source: CRA, GST/HST Policy Statement P-077R2, Single and Multiple Supplies. See also Excise Tax Act, Schedule VI, Part V: s. 7 and its carve-outs for services rendered to an individual in Canada, services in respect of Canadian real property, and services in respect of tangible personal property situated in Canada; s. 8 (advertising); s. 10 (intellectual property). On documenting the client's status, see CRA's GST/HST Memorandum 4-5-1.

If your invoices bundle the shoot and the rights into one number, that is the thing to change first, before any of the rest of this becomes actionable. Price them separately, describe them separately, and make the licence terms explicit enough that the two elements can stand on their own.

Why the assessment comes in at 15%, not 5%

When a supply of intangible personal property is taxable and made in Canada, the next question is which province it's made in, because that sets the rate. Part 1 of the New Harmonized Value-added Tax System Regulations answers it with a cascade, and the last rung of that cascade is brutal for anyone selling to foreign clients.

The rules work through the "Canadian rights," the part of the property that can be used in Canada. Where those rights aren't confined primarily to one group of provinces, the regulation looks for a home or business address in Canada that you obtained in the ordinary course of business. Your American client doesn't have one. And when no such address exists, the fallback is explicit: the supply is made in the province whose tax rate is the highest among the provinces in which the property can be used.

Source: New Harmonized Value-added Tax System Regulations (SOR/2010-117), Part 1, ss. 6 and 8: the place-of-supply rules for intangible personal property. See also CRA's GST/HST Memorandum 3-3-5.

A worldwide licence can be used in every province. The highest rate among them is 15%, shared by New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Prince Edward Island. So a Toronto studio, an Alberta illustrator, and a Vancouver production company all get assessed at the New Brunswick rate on the same facts, having never had a client or a dollar of revenue in Atlantic Canada.

Now put a number on it. This is the arithmetic from the audit letter that opened this article, rounded and stripped of identifying detail:

That is the real damage. The tax itself is only a transfer. The sting is that it comes out of profit already earned, spent, and taxed, on a job that was quoted and priced as if the tax didn't exist.

You sold whatever your paperwork says you sold

Which branch of the fork you land on isn't decided by what you feel you did for the money. It's decided by the agreement. And in the creative industries, the standard agreement is practically engineered to land on the intellectual-property branch.

Start with who owns the work. Under the Copyright Act, the author of a work is the first owner of the copyright in it. Until 2012 there was a special rule handing ownership of commissioned photographs to the person who ordered them; that rule was repealed. Today a photographer, illustrator, or designer owns the copyright in what they make unless they're an employee making it in the course of employment, and any assignment or grant of an interest is invalid unless it's in writing and signed.

Source: Copyright Act, s. 13(1), (3) and (4). Former s. 13(2), the commissioned-works rule, was repealed by S.C. 2012, c. 20, s. 7.

So every commercial creative contract has to do something about rights, and what it typically does is grant a licence: "Photographer grants Client a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to use the Images…" That sentence is not decorative. It is the sentence that makes your invoice a supply of intellectual property under section 10, deems it made in Canada under section 142(1)(c), and hangs your zero-rating on whether the client holds a Canadian tax number.

Which points at the way out, and at the argument that actually resolved the audit above. Where the engagement is genuinely a supply of services (the studio was paid for production labour and delivered files under an arrangement where it never held or granted any rights), section 10 is the wrong provision entirely, and section 7 applies without any registration condition. In that case the studio responded with the contract, showing it had no rights to license and had granted none. No changes were made to the return.

That phrase, "never held or granted any rights," does a lot of work in one clause, and it is worth slowing down on, because photographers reasonably ask what a shoot with no rights attached could possibly look like. The answer is that it is rarely about leaving rights out of a contract. It is about not having owned them in the first place.

Copyright starts with authorship. Press the shutter and the images are yours, which means the client cannot publish them until you hand over permission, which puts you on the intellectual property branch whether or not the paperwork uses the word. The rights-free engagement is the one where you were never the author. You granted nothing because you had nothing to grant.

Put two studios side by side and the point lands. Both invoice the same foreign brand for the same amount on the same week.

From the sidewalk these are the same job. Same set, same lights, same call sheet, same invoice value. The only difference is who authored the photographs, and it moves the engagement between two provisions that behave nothing alike. Studio B's position is not a drafting trick. It is a different business, and the contract simply records which business you were in that week.

Every other genuinely rights-free engagement has the same shape. Retouching another studio's files, supplying crew and equipment, scouting locations, pulling permits, casting, digitech. In each one you are selling labour into somebody else's authorship, and section 10 never enters the picture.

Which gives you a test to run on any invoice. After this job, can the client publish the images without asking you for anything further? If yes because you granted a licence, you are on the property branch and their registration decides the tax. If yes because you never owned the images, you are on the services branch and their registration is irrelevant. If the honest answer is no, the tax question is the smaller of your problems, because the client did not get what they paid for.

Three honest cautions before you decide that's your position too:

• An assignment is not an escape. Section 10 covers a supply of "copyright… or any right, licence or privilege to use any such property." Selling the copyright outright is still a supply of intellectual property. Transferring more rights doesn't move you to the services branch. It plants you firmly on the IP branch.
• Shooting physical product in Canada raises its own question. Section 7 excludes "a service in respect of tangible personal property that is situated in Canada at the time the service is performed." Whether photographing a client's product that's sitting in your Toronto studio falls inside that carve-out is a live question, not a settled one. If that's your business model, get an opinion rather than an assumption.
• Substance beats labels. Deleting the word "licence" from an agreement that plainly transfers rights does not change what was supplied. CRA reads the whole arrangement. The goal is a contract that accurately describes a service engagement, not a service engagement costume.

Splitting the invoice does not split the supply

Once the licence problem is understood, a tempting fix presents itself. Break the invoice up. Put 75% against production and subcontractors, put 25% against the images and the rights, and if CRA ever comes calling, only the smaller number is at risk. It looks like sensible structuring. It usually accomplishes nothing, and it fails for a reason that arrives before any of the single-supply analysis.

A recharged cost is not a supply. When you hire second shooters, retouchers, stylists or a studio in your own name, those are your costs of producing what you sell. They are inputs. Passing them along in a line on your invoice does not turn them into a separate supply that you made to the client, and it does not give them a tax character of their own. The client never bought your relationship with a retoucher. They bought images they could run. A line item labelled "subcontractors" describes how you arrived at the price. It does not describe a second thing you sold.

There is one narrow exception, and it is narrower than most people hope. Where you act as a genuine agent, procuring something on the client's behalf under an arrangement where the client is the contracting party and you merely pay on their account, the recharge can be a disbursement rather than consideration for your own supply. That takes a real agency relationship, evidenced by the underlying paperwork. A photographer who engages a crew on their own contracts is not in that position.

Then the single-supply question arrives, and it is unforgiving. CRA's test is whether elements can sensibly and realistically be broken out, or whether one is so dominated by another that it has lost any separate identity. The practical version of that question: could the client have bought one without the other? On a campaign commission the answer is plainly no. Raw files carrying no rights are useless to a brand that needs to publish them, and a licence with no images attached is nothing at all. Those elements were never severable, which makes the whole thing one supply, taxed according to its predominant element. On a commission built around usage, that element is the rights.

Source: CRA, GST/HST Policy Statement P-077R2, Single and Multiple Supplies.

So an invoice split 75/25 against a registered non-resident does not produce a 25% exposure. It produces a full exposure with a paper trail showing you understood there was a rights component and priced it.

The structure is usually solving a problem that does not exist. Photographers often reach for it believing they need to surface the subcontractor cost to recover the tax they paid on it. They do not. A zero-rated supply is a taxable supply at 0%, and it preserves input tax credits in full. The HST you paid your Canadian crew comes back to you whether the invoice you issued was taxable or zero-rated. That is the entire practical difference between zero-rated and exempt, and it means there is no tax reason to itemize your costs to a client at all.

None of which makes itemizing wrong. Separating a shoot fee from a licence fee is worth doing, and it is a different act from breaking out your costs. The distinction is whether a line describes something the client received or something you spent. For a split to carry any weight, all of the following need to be true:

• Each line is a deliverable, not an input. A licence is a deliverable. Retouching you paid for is an input. Only the first kind of line can have its own tax treatment.
• The elements are genuinely severable. The client could have bought one and declined the other, and the arrangement would still make commercial sense.
• The paperwork agrees with the invoice. Separate scopes, separate prices, separate terms, ideally separate agreements. An invoice cannot create a commercial structure that the contract does not contain.
• The allocation is defensible on its own. A number chosen because it reduces tax, rather than because it reflects what each element is worth, is the first thing an auditor will test.

And the same principle that closes the section above closes this one. Substance beats labels, on the invoice exactly as in the contract. The two levers that genuinely move this outcome are the client's registration status and the territorial scope of the licence. How you subtotal the page is not a third one.

Why so many American companies have a Canadian tax number

The reflex objection is: surely a registered foreign client is a freak occurrence? It isn't, and the registration rules explain why.

A non-resident who doesn't carry on any business in Canada isn't required to register. But a non-resident who does carry on business here generally is. And beyond that, the Act specifically opens voluntary registration to non-residents who, in the ordinary course of carrying on business outside Canada, regularly solicit orders for goods to be exported to Canada, or have entered into an agreement to supply services to be performed in Canada or intangible personal property to be used in Canada.

Source: Excise Tax Act, s. 240(1)(c) (non-residents not carrying on business in Canada) and s. 240(3)(b) (voluntary registration by non-residents).

Now think about the kind of client that hires a Canadian creative studio for a real budget. A consumer brand whose products sit on shelves at Canadian retailers. A software company with Canadian subscribers. An agency running Canadian media. Any of them may be registered, often because registering lets them recover the GST/HST they pay on Canadian costs, including yours. There's also a residence trap layered on top: a non-resident with a permanent establishment in Canada is deemed resident in respect of activities carried on through it, so a US parent with a Canadian branch or office may not be a non-resident for the part of the relationship that matters.

Source: Excise Tax Act, s. 132(2).

Work one of those through, because the signals are easy to read once you know they are signals. A US beauty brand hires you for a campaign, and their products are stocked at a Canadian retailer.

Start with what that fact does not do. It does not touch the section 7 carve-out for goods situated in Canada, because that test asks where the product was when you photographed it, not where it was sold months later. A sample couriered to your studio engages the carve-out. A shoot done abroad does not. Shelves in a Canadian store are downstream of the question and have nothing to say about it.

What it does do is settle the deeming rule. A brand with Canadian distribution is going to run those images in Canada, on the retailer's site, in Canadian point of sale, in geo-targeted social. The licence may be used in Canada, section 142(1)(c) deems the supply made here, and the mirror provision in 142(2)(c) is unavailable, because no brand will accept a licence that excludes a market it actively sells into.

Then the signal that actually decides it. A brand whose product is on Canadian shelves is precisely the profile that registers, either because it is carrying on business here or because registration lets it recover the GST/HST it pays at import and on Canadian costs, including yours. The retail distribution does not make your invoice taxable. It makes it likely that the one condition standing between you and a taxable invoice has already failed. Read it as a prompt to check, never as a conclusion in either direction.

Two things are worth confirming on that fact pattern. First, who the recipient actually is, because a brand with Canadian distribution often has a Canadian entity, and if the invoice goes to it the recipient is a resident and the export analysis never begins. Second, whether the brand has a Canadian office, sales rep or subsidiary, which is the section 132(2) trap above. A retailer buying at arm's length and reselling is not the brand's establishment. A Canadian sales office is a different matter.

Here's the part that makes the whole episode so frustrating: if the client is registered, the HST costs them nothing. They claim it back as an input tax credit. The tax you failed to charge would have been fully recoverable by the person you failed to charge it to. The entire $14,700 loss exists because a question was never asked.

CRA makes this your job, not your client's

The second letter in that audit file made the expectation explicit, and it's worth quoting because it's the standard you'll be held to:

"Suppliers who are registrants are responsible for determining the residence or registration status of their customers. For the supply to be zero-rated, satisfactory evidence should be retained by suppliers, indicating that their customers are non-residents and, where applicable, not registered for GST/HST purposes."

Two duties, both yours. Establish the status, and keep the proof. CRA's memorandum on determining residence status sets out, in its appendices, the documentation the agency will generally accept, including signed certifications from the customer covering non-residence and, where the provision requires it, non-registration.

Source: CRA, GST/HST Memorandum 4-5-1, Exports – Determining Residence Status (Appendix A: proof of non-residence; Appendix B: proof of non-residence and non-registration).

In practice this is a two-line addition to your onboarding, not a compliance project. Before the first invoice on any foreign engagement, get a written confirmation from the client (an email from a person with authority to say it is fine) covering:

• That the client is not resident in Canada for GST/HST purposes, and does not have a permanent establishment in Canada connected with this engagement.
• That the client is not registered for GST/HST. If they are, their registration number.
• The date, so the statement is anchored to the time of supply. Registration status changes; a confirmation from three years ago proves nothing about today.

If they give you a number, run it through the CRA's registry to confirm it's live and matches the legal name on the contract, the same discipline you'd apply to a supplier's number before claiming an input tax credit. Then file the email with the contract, not in a mailbox you'll lose in the next migration. The point of this record is that it exists two, three, four years from now, when the letter arrives.

Source: CRA, Confirming a GST/HST account number (the GST/HST Registry). See also No Receipt, No GST Number.

Jasmine invoiced New York and got assessed in New Brunswick

Jasmine Okonkwo runs Fold & Frame Studio, a two-person commercial photography practice in Toronto. She shoots product and campaign work, mostly for beauty and consumer-goods brands, and about 40% of her revenue comes from American clients. She's registered for GST/HST, files quarterly, and has never had a compliance problem in nine years.

In 2024 she landed the biggest engagement of her career: two campaign shoots for a US beauty brand, invoiced at $62,000 and $36,000. Her contract used the same rights clause she'd used since 2017: a perpetual, worldwide licence to use the images across all media. She zero-rated both invoices without a second thought. The client was a Delaware corporation with a New York office. Exports aren't taxable. Everyone knows that.

What Jasmine didn't know was that her client sold through Canadian retailers and had held a GST/HST registration since 2019. When the audit letter came in early 2026, the auditor's reasoning ran exactly along the statutory track: the licence was intangible personal property that could be used in Canada, so section 142(1)(c) deemed the supply made in Canada; section 10 zero-rating requires a non-resident who is not registered, and this one was; with no Canadian address on file and a worldwide licence, the place-of-supply cascade landed on the highest participating-province rate. Proposed adjustment: $14,700, plus interest running from 2024.

Jasmine's first instinct was to go back to the client. That conversation went nowhere. The brand had changed marketing directors twice, the campaign had wrapped, the purchase orders were closed, and nobody on their side had any interest in reopening a two-year-old file to process a Canadian tax invoice, even one they could have recovered in full. The $14,700 came out of her operating account.

Two questions and one email

Every version of the fix here is cheap. That's what makes the outcome so galling.

She could have asked. A single line in her onboarding questionnaire ("Are you registered for GST/HST in Canada? If so, please provide your number") would have surfaced the registration before the first invoice. She then adds 15% to a client who claims every cent of it back. Her net position is identical, and there's no audit exposure at all.

She could have priced it. Knowing the client was registered, she could have quoted the licence fee tax-included and remitted from it. Less elegant, but still $14,700 better than paying it herself.

She could have structured it. If the commercial reality was that the brand wanted a production service and full ownership of the deliverables was never really in play, the agreement could have been written to reflect that, putting the engagement under section 7, where the client's tax number is nobody's problem. This is a conversation to have with counsel and your accountant before the contract is signed, not a rewrite you attempt afterwards.

What she can't do is fix it in the return. There is no input tax credit for tax you should have charged and didn't, no rebate, no adjustment. Unlike most GST/HST errors, this one has no downstream remedy. It is only ever prevented.

The same test runs a second time

If you're in Quebec, run the whole analysis twice. The QST system mirrors the federal rules closely, and Revenu Québec applies the same basic structure to exports: sales of intangible personal property (biens incorporels) to non-residents who are not registrants are generally zero-rated, with services to non-residents governed by their own set of conditions.

"Closely" is not "identically," and the QST registration status of a foreign client is a separate fact from their GST/HST status. A client can hold one and not the other. Ask for both.

Source: Revenu Québec, Sales of Services to Non-Residents and Exports of Property Outside Canada.

Ask the question you've never asked

Almost everything in GST/HST compliance can be repaired after the fact. You can amend a return, claim a late input tax credit inside the window, ask a supplier for a credit note. This one can't. By the time you learn your foreign client was registered, the supply is years old, the client is gone, and the tax is yours.

So the whole defence is a habit, and it fits on a sticky note. On every engagement with a client outside Canada, before the first invoice: confirm in writing that they are not resident in Canada, and confirm in writing whether they are registered for GST/HST and QST. Then read your own rights clause and be honest about whether you're selling a service or licensing intellectual property, because the second answer only matters if you're on the intellectual-property branch, and most creative contracts are.

It takes one email. The alternative, as one studio found out, is a five-figure invoice from the CRA for tax on money that was already spent.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute tax, legal, or accounting advice. GST/HST and QST rules change, and how they apply depends on your registration status, your contracts, and the specific facts of each engagement. Whether a particular supply is a service or intangible personal property is a question of fact and law that turns on the whole arrangement. The figures and scenarios used are illustrative and anonymized. Consult a qualified professional about your own situation before relying on any position described here.

Primary sources, linked so you can read and interpret them yourself. Legislative links open on the official Justice Laws website; agency links open on Government of Canada and Gouvernement du Québec websites.

• Excise Tax Act: s. 142(1)(c) and s. 142(2)(c) (when a supply of intangible personal property is made in, or outside, Canada), s. 132(2) (permanent establishment deems residence), and s. 240(1) and (3) (required and voluntary registration, including by non-residents)
• Excise Tax Act: Schedule VI, Part V (Exports): s. 7 (services to non-residents), s. 8 (advertising), s. 10 (intellectual property), s. 10.1 (other intangible personal property), s. 23 (advisory, professional and consulting services), s. 23.1 (technical and customer support)
• New Harmonized Value-added Tax System Regulations (SOR/2010-117), Part 1, ss. 5–8: the place-of-supply rules for intangible personal property, including the highest-rate fallback
• Copyright Act, s. 13: first ownership of copyright, works made in the course of employment, and the writing requirement for assignments and licences
• CRA, GST/HST Memorandum 4-5-1, Exports – Determining Residence Status and Memorandum 4-5-3, Exports – Services and Intangible Personal Property
• CRA, GST/HST Memorandum 3-3-5, Place of Supply in a Province – General Rules for Intangible Personal Property
• CRA, Confirming a GST/HST account number and Charge and collect the GST/HST (which rate to charge)
• Revenu Québec, Sales of Services to Non-Residents
• Related reading: Zero-Rated vs. Exempt, Which Province's Rate Do You Charge?, The $30,000 Question, and Simplified GST/HST and Foreign Vendors

About the author

Rodney Maiato

Rodney Maiato is the founder of CDL Accounting Solutions, a remote bookkeeping practice helping Canadian incorporated small businesses keep clean, audit-ready books without the year-end scramble. He brings 15+ years in accounting (from junior accountant to assistant controller, where he managed a team of 7 and oversaw the books of 25+ companies, plus payroll for 100+ employees across several provinces) and is a Payroll Compliance Professional (PCP) Candidate with the National Payroll Institute. He also builds the automation behind CDL, including its text-in receipt intake system.