Re: On accounting and engineering.(Slightly offtopic)

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

Robert Dewar wrote in message
<5ee5b646.0208220201.627c534@posting.google.com>...
>"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote in message
news:<um7r10d6be2cdf@corp.supernews.com>...


>> If you are a large company and you try that sort of
>> accounting, you go to jail (see Enron, Worldcom, et. al.)
>> Hiding expenses as assets is frowned upon.
>
>Legal advice is always dubious on this newsgroup. Appallingly ignorant
>and incorrect legal advice is really annoying. Randy, please don't
guess about
>things you know nothing about. You obviously have not the foggiest idea
how items are categorized
>as expenses or assets. Of course hardware  acquisitions are assets and
not expenses.

I wasn't talking about hardware at all, only his remarks about software.
He essentially said that you don't depreciate software, which is dead
wrong. And software is an asset, not an expense, in most cases.

RRS's accountants actually tried to have us assetize every software
purchase in the late 80s; there were hundreds of such purchases that
cost $19 and the like. We finally talked them into letting us expense
stuff under $100 as being immaterial. Else the tax returns and financial
reports would have been a nightmare.

My understanding is that software can only be expensed if it has no
value at the end of 12 months. Thus, subscriptions like MSDN can be
expensed; most other software has to be capitalized and depreciated.

Please, Robert, don't jump off on the deep end about *my* accounting
knowledge as soon as you misread my response. I'd have to be pretty
stupid to not learn a lot of that in 22 years of being an officer of a
corporation with many shareholders...

But I do agree on one point: see a professional if this matters to you;
don't take my word for it (or Robert's, or any other engineer on this
newsgroup).

                Randy.