You set the retail price. The Designer charges you a trade price for making the piece. What is left over is yours, and it is called your margin.

That margin is a subtraction between two GST-inclusive numbers, so it carries GST in the same proportion the sale did. That is why the next section matters: your margin is not the same as your payout.

Everyone earns the same base on the same sale. GST is then added on top, but only where GST actually applies — and it applies only if you are registered (s 9-5). If you are not registered, you are not making a taxable supply, so there is no GST to add.

The base is your margin with the GST taken out of it. Because prices here already include GST, that is a division by eleven rather than a percentage taken off (s 9-75) — and where GST does apply, The Designer claims back exactly the amount it added to your payout (s 11-20), so paying it costs The Designer nothing and earns you nothing.

The two rows in bold are the point. You keep $50.00 either way. A registered photographer is paid $55.00 and remits $5.00 of it to the ATO; an unregistered one is paid $50.00 and keeps all of it. Being registered does not earn you more, and not being registered does not earn you less.

1. 1
   Your client's payment clears

   The sale appears on your statement at Earnings straight away, and is added to Owed to you.
2. 2
   The Designer pays you

   Payments go out by bank transfer. Your bank details are arranged with the studio directly — there is nowhere in the app to enter them. A payout settles whole orders, oldest first: each sale together with any refund on it, at the net. A payment can cover some of your orders and leave later ones owing, but it never covers part of one.
3. 3
   The lines are marked settled

   Every entry the payment covered — refunds included — stops reading unsettled and is tied to that payout, so you can always see which payment covered which sale. The payout’s document itemises exactly those entries and adds up to exactly what you were paid.

Every payout produces a document. Which one is decided when the payout is made, by whether you are registered for GST on that day. The GST on each line inside it is still judged on the day that sale was paid — so a tax invoice can carry lines with no GST, earned before your registration started, and each line says whether it is taxable.

One exception each way. If you have registered but everything a payout settles was earned before your registration started, none of it carries GST, so you get a remittance advice that says exactly that. And if your registration has ended while sales from when you were registered are still unpaid, those carry GST that neither document can properly show after the fact, so we hold them and sort out the right paperwork with you rather than guess.

Both are on your Earnings page, against the payout they belong to. The total on either is the amount that actually reached you.

Registration is compulsory once your business turns over $75,000 or more (s 23-5). That threshold is measured across everything your business earns — shoots, sessions, prints you sell elsewhere — not just what comes through The Designer. We can only see our own share of it, so we will never tell you that you have crossed it. We will prompt you to check when our share alone gets close.

When you add your registration in your settings, three things change: sales paid from your registration date carry GST on top of the same base, your payouts come with a recipient-created tax invoice instead of an advice, and you become responsible for remitting that GST. The tax invoice needs the conditions under When you’re paid; until they are all met, a registered business cannot be paid.

If a client is refunded, the part of your margin that sale earned comes back off your balance, in proportion to how much was refunded. A refund is an adjustment to the original supply (Div 19), so it reverses the GST as well as the money — and it is filed against the month the sale was in, not the month of the refund, so a statement you have already read still adds up.

Before the sale is paid out, the refund simply nets against it: the payout covers the order at what is left, and the document shows the sale and the refund as two lines. After it has been paid out, the refund comes off your next payout instead, shown as an adjustment to the earlier one. If that earlier document was a tax invoice and the refund reverses GST, the adjustment is set out as a recipient-created adjustment note, with the invoice it adjusts named on it.

Export CSV on the Earnings page gives your accountant every line with its date, GST and payout reference. Totals are added up from the individual lines rather than recalculated from the total, which is what keeps them to the cent (s 9-90).