Canadian sales tax

Rivet’s $70 / month price is **before sales tax**. The applicable Canadian sales tax — HST, GST, or GST + PST depending on your province — is added on top of the$70 at checkout. Stripe Tax calculates and collects it; you don’t configure anything, and we don’t either.

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What you pay, by province

The total you see at checkout, and on every monthly invoice, is $70 plus the relevant tax rate for your billing address. As of writing: Stripe Tax tracks rate changes automatically. If a province updates its rate, your next invoice reflects the new rate without us touching anything.

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How Stripe knows your province

From the billing address you enter at checkout. The form Stripe shows includes a country, province, and postal code. The province determines the rate; the postal code is for tax-authority compliance when a province has sub-provincial rate variations (rare, but the mechanism exists). If you move provinces: The transition month uses whichever province’s rate was on file at the moment the charge ran. If you moved on the 5th and got charged on the 18th, the new province’s rate applies.

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Claiming input tax credits

Your Rivet subscription is a normal business expense. If you’re registered for GST/HST and use Rivet to deliver your practice’s services, the GST/HST on each invoice is recoverable as an input tax credit. Standard CRA rules apply — your bookkeeper handles this. Every Rivet invoice from Stripe includes:

• Our business name (Rivet Systems Inc.).
• Our registered business address (Belle River, Ontario).
• Our GST/HST number.
• The tax amount broken out as its own line.

That’s the exact set of fields the CRA requires on an input-tax-credit document. Your bookkeeper can claim the credit straight from the invoice PDF.

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Are health-care services tax-exempt?

A common question for therapists and other regulated practitioners. Health-care services your clients receive from you may be GST/HST exempt under the CRA’s health-services rules — but the tools you use to deliver them aren’t. Software subscriptions like Rivet are taxable supplies regardless of how the underlying practice is classified. If you’re a regulated practitioner uncertain about your own tax-exempt status, talk to an accountant familiar with your province. We can’t advise on the exemption status of your specific practice.

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Why this is handled by Stripe Tax, not Rivet

A short rationale, for transparency:

• Provincial rates change. Stripe Tax has compliance staff whose full-time job is tracking these changes; we’d be re-implementing their work badly.
• Sub-provincial nuances matter. Some municipalities have transient accommodation taxes, some have rate-variation rules; Stripe Tax encodes these correctly for the categories that apply to digital services.
• Audit defensibility. When a CRA auditor asks why a specific invoice charged 13% instead of 15%, Stripe Tax has a documented ruling for every charge. Building our own would mean defending our own table of rules; routing through Stripe Tax means the answer is “their published methodology.”

The downside: we can’t override Stripe Tax. If you believe the rate on your invoice is wrong, email us and we’ll open a case with Stripe.

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