Too many people are getting hung up on a philosophical discussion of whether this is the “correct” taxation approach or not.
All of that is a nonsense and a distraction. The tax system is completely arbitrary and made up. It doesn’t matter whether something fits a certain definition or not. The only thing that matters are what the benefits and what the costs of doing a certain thing is.
And it’s pretty obvious that there are almost no benefits and there are massive costs to this approach.
znpy 43 days ago [-]
> And it’s pretty obvious that there are almost no benefits and there are massive costs to this approach.
could you disambiguate to which approach are you referring when you write "this approach" ?
nunez 43 days ago [-]
I'm surprised by the lack of discussion about this provision on here. This is the Startup Forum™; I thought it'd be a bigger deal. Unless it's not a big deal in the macro?
lesuorac 43 days ago [-]
It's Friday during both the summer and the Olympics for a topic that has been discussed a lot.
For context, this is the Section 174 from the Trump Tax Cuts. Everyone expected it would be reversed before it went into effect, but the 118th congress has been largely unable to pass any legislation.
tl;dr - previously companies could choose 1 or 5 years to amortize, now no choice & clarification that most software development counts as capital improvements (like building a factory). Many smaller companies are getting surprise tax bills this year, many of us have been putting it off with standard tax deferments (6 months)
People here love to complain about this rule but they generally don’t have any reason to justify themselves other than “it’s bad for me personally”.
You’re building software. That software is generally intended for use in the future. It is not “consumed” this year. Youre not deleting your repos every year. You’re a tech a company. Your product is an asset that you built.
There’s an argument that maintenance could be carved out but generally speaking most development is development. Triply so for startups.
The startups crying that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes until they’re bigger can deal. The only reason you have a tax bill is because you have taxable revenue.
lazide 43 days ago [-]
The vast majority of tools you can expense the year you buy them.
It's only large capital expenditures (that usually can be resold for similar amounts as purchased at) that require amortization/depreciation. For example, an Excavator.
There are situations the labor would be considered a capital expenditure, which you can then get ROI off of, but amortizing labor costs over multiple years is a pretty odd situation.
If you couldn't, it would get reaaaaly ugly real fast, since the big challenge here is that cash gets spent this year, while it is only deductable against income taxes years later. So if I get $1mln in income now, and spend $1mln on say software R&D, i'd end up owing a bunch of taxes on the $1mln of income using cash I just don't have anymore.
In the case of an excavator or whatever, there is a sellable asset which someone can turn around and sell to get cash if there is a problem. In the case of construction labor, there is usually some improved property or accounts receivable somewhere that can be used to pay the taxes too. In software R&D there rarely is.
Outsourcing can do it though.
jncfhnb 43 days ago [-]
> So if I get $1mln in income now, and spend $1mln on say software R&D, i'd end up owing a bunch of taxes on the $1mln of income using cash I just don't have anymore.
Then go get a loan which should be easy because you’ve demonstrated $1M revenue with 100% gross profit margin. A complete non issue and painfully unrealistic because how are you paying for the $1M capitalized expenses before you have the revenues? Yes, you have to raise funds to start a business. Shocking.
lazide 43 days ago [-]
So your proposed solution to someone having a cash crunch (with no easy liquidatable assets) is to take on debt?
Which most banks or investors are going to be pretty hesitant to do, because cash crunch with low assets?
Some business environments, sure. Others? Not so much.
Is it impossible? Hopefully not. But is is a major change from how it used to work.
jncfhnb 43 days ago [-]
You have insanely good financials in this contrived scenario. Raising debt or equity should not be a problem.
lazide 42 days ago [-]
Only if you can cut opex - aka software dev costs. And aren’t killed by having to pay taxes on 800k of money you already spent on what otherwise would be a business expense.
Which is why there is such a huge push for offshoring.
As stated, without some significant changes that company is doomed in short order with the new rules.
jncfhnb 42 days ago [-]
Literally not software dev costs. It’s in the prompt. You literally cannot simultaneously describe software dev as opex and still talk about the 800k. Those are mutually exclusive framings of the context.
lazide 42 days ago [-]
Uh yeah, that's the point.
Software dev as 'opex' (actually R&D, which had the same treatment as opex) == the old way.
800k in 'income' you've already spent to do what your company exists to do, but have to pay taxes on this year == the new way.
1auralynn 43 days ago [-]
Have you ever bootstrapped a business? If no, maybe you wouldn't be so flippant here if you had. Loans are not easy to get as a small business, particularly ones with favorable interest rates.
jncfhnb 43 days ago [-]
Loans are exceptionally easy to get when you have $1M in REVENUE with NO OPERATIONAL EXPENSES. It’s the premise that’s contrived here.
lazide 43 days ago [-]
If you are a software company, that $1 million you spent on software devs is your operating expense. Actual profit that year is $0.
On a cash accounting basis it’s actually worse, because that company is seriously in the red after paying taxes with the new rules. Previously it would have netted out at $0.
Of course someone is going to be hesitant to loan money in that situation, unless you can cut those expenses. Which if you’re in a highly competitive market could mean death to your company.
Is it overly simplistic? No shit, it’s an example to illustrate why startups are getting worked up right now because they have sudden cashflow issues. And why larger companies are also doing layoffs and trying very hard to reduce their software dev spend. Including outsourcing, where they can.
Because the actual way most companies will solve this once they figure it out is to not spend all their cash on software dev, and instead reduce it significantly.
Because this new treatment means instead of being able to write income off as a straight business expense in the year they spent it, they have to pay taxes on money they’ve already spent in that year, and then can only make it up fractionally after that.
So in the example I gave? Companies taxes that year are zero with the prior R&D rules. They had zero taxable income.
With the updates to section 174, now they owe taxes on $800k of taxable income the first year.
Huge difference.
They can still eventually write off the whole $1mln they spent in year one, but that is a hell of a big difference in cash flow. Even if dev spend is flat for 5 years, it will take that long for it to look the same cash flow wise. And it’s rarely ever actually flat.
And that is not even taking into account the increased cost of money going on, tightening access to credit. If you pulled off this situation while being in a safe industry that a bank will write a loan for you easily, then cool.
But they’re surprisingly weird sometimes, and if you’re in year one it can be hard to get anyone to return your calls at all if there is anything ‘non-traditional’ about you. Which is most startups.And the ‘startup banks’ where it was easy (SVB and first republic) all got nuked.
So you could easily end up paying 25% APR on short term financing to close this gap, if anyone is talking to you at all.
jncfhnb 42 days ago [-]
> If you are a software company, that $1 million you spent on software devs is your operating expense. Actual profit that year is $0.
No, it’s not. Net income here is $800k (20% amortization). Gross income is $1M. Because accounting recognizes that the value of your investments today are useful next year. If you sold a million dollars of your software this year, it’s extremely likely that you will be able to sell the same software next year. You’re not starting from scratch in 2025.
> On a cash accounting basis it’s actually worse, because that company is seriously in the red after paying taxes with the new rules. Previously it would have netted out at $0.
And that’s an example of why cash based accounting is not they way businesses track their financials. It’s misleading.
Your understanding of finance here is completely backwards. Think about it. Would you rather loan money to a company that paid $1M contractors to do work for $1M in revenue? Or to a company that spent $1M building a product that sold $1M in services that year?
Obviously, OBVIOUSLY, the second one is more enticing. The contractor company is extracting zero profit and is poised to do the same next year. The software company built a product and they can continue selling. Whether the market is really competitive and whether they might need to continue investing in the product to stay competitive is a tangential concern and a secondary consideration about the business environment that does not factor into our basic understanding of assets here.
Whining about funding being hard to get or that business is hard does not define what an asset is. Imagine a factory owner saying “well the Chinese just built an automated factory so I’ll need to double my investment next year to make sure my products can compete in the market, so I’m going to say that my building of factory doesn’t count as an investment because that just works out nicer for me. It’s only fair. The business environment is competitive!”
lazide 42 days ago [-]
And this right here is the difference between theory and practice.
Because in theory sure.
Though previously there was the far more profitable and easy to deal with theory of building an actual asset of large value (monetized via stock/equity) while treating the expenses to do it as straightforward business expenses with no amortization to be a PITA, and the IRS was willing to go along on that.
In practice, this is exactly how you run your startup into a wall at 100 mph while you bounce payroll checks and end up in a morass of legal trouble. Because cashflow absolutely matters, and startups and small businesses rarely can just get ‘free’ debt at a moments notice to smooth it all out. Even large ones are having more difficulty than ever.
Call it whining all you want - it’s a significant concern partially driving market behavior. Remote work also meaning outsourcing is back on the table being another.
jncfhnb 42 days ago [-]
The “theory vs practice” split here is about whether your business made any sense in the current environment, not the definition of an asset.
“Business is hard” is not an argument to redefine what an asset is
lazide 42 days ago [-]
This is really hilarious actually.
Because this was all due to a change of the rules on existing behaviors, and created a new capital asset which previously didn’t need to be recognized.
And because you seem to be saying ‘suck it up’, which of course sure whatever. Business is what it is, and folks get what they get.
But of course what is going to happen is the related companies are just going to fire some people/lay them off, or go bankrupt and then do that to everyone.
I don’t actually care - I pivoted in a way it benefits me several years back - but what else does anyone expect to happen?
Then the whining and finger pointing happens of course on the state of the labor market, and no one ever points one back to themselves. shrug
gamblor956 43 days ago [-]
The vast majority of tools you can expense the year you buy them
That is not true in the U.S. All capital assets must be depreciated. This includes all tools and equipment except for very short life consumables (< 1 year).
lazide 43 days ago [-]
No one sane is depreciating hand tools or anything smaller/less valuable than a bobcat. At least for businesses that aren’t doing millions of dollars worth of them.
Why do you think they should? Care to quote a section of the tax code?
No one, including the IRS, wants to deal with mountains of BS paperwork over small stuff like this.
“To determine when to expense and when to capitalize, consider both the de minimus rule and the useful economic life.
The de minimis rule allows you to expense any item that may potentially be capitalized so long as said expense (or the sum of related expenses) does not significantly distort your bottom line. In other words, these expenses cannot make up a large percentage of your total expenses, subsequently providing you with an extraordinarily low income. A strong metric to follow is that the sum of the expenses should be less than 0.1% of your gross receipts for the year, and/or 2% of your total depreciation and amortization expense for the year.
Any item that will retain no value after 12 months may be expensed. Do note that the IRS may frown upon deductions that appear to take advantage of end-of-year timing. If you incur an expense in December and then consume the item in January, you may need to argue that the deduction did not distort your bottom line in order to take it.“
jncfhnb 42 days ago [-]
There is no paperwork involved in depreciating a piece of furniture over a standard schedule. You seem to be of the belief that you are required to show documentation tracking individual assets. That’s not true any more than proving the payment actually occurre as for expenses.
The de minimus rule is, as your own quote indicates, for a tiny, tiny subset of your assets.
lazide 42 days ago [-]
You need to track and document assets in your books to depreciate them, and in the event of an audit you need to substantiate it.
That is paperwork. Unless your tax folks are just yolo’ing amounts into the appropriate fields in your taxes anyway, in which case you’ve got bigger problems.
You are correct that it doesn’t necessarily require going out and tracking say every individual desk.
But to depreciate it, you would need to be able to show you bought x desks for y $$ (and those were reasonable business expenses), including receipts, and if the IRS got worked up, they might demand to see said desks. Which if you had no idea where they were, is going to be hard eh?
And then you need to track them over the period of time you’re depreciating them (and how much was depreciated).
Which for a small business is not worth the hassle at all.
And it is highly unlikely the amount they spent on said desks is not de minimus.
If you are IBM or sprint or whatever? Then sure. That is why they have massive accounting departments, asset tag everything, etc.
Even they don’t bother with hand tools and the like for tax purposes though.
they can’t do things the easy (and legal) way.
prepend 43 days ago [-]
> The vast majority of tools you can expense the year you buy them.
Not ones that you build.
lazide 43 days ago [-]
Materials and labor to build them, yes you can. Same for if they're not overly expensive or valuable.
For it to be a capital expense they'd need to be large, sellable assets. For example, formwork? Jigs (except for something really exceptionally expensive perhaps)? Hand tools? Less-expensive-than-a-truck custom machinery? Not a problem to write off as a normal expense.
'Gigapress'? Yeah, thats a capital investment/expense.
The difference here is 'is this something you built/bought to get a job done' (aka an expense), or 'is this a large valuable asset (with a market value)'. It's a sliding scale with many exceptions.
Someones $100k snap-on set for example MIGHT be considered a Capital expense, not a normal business expense, depending on the circumstances and scale.
There is a pretty sizable cap too where you can do whatever and not worry about it too much, a bit over $1mln if I remember correctly.
verdverm 43 days ago [-]
The computer you develop on gets amortized, typically over 3 years. It's much more complicated than you realize. It's tied to the useful life of the thing.
What changed is that almost all software development was classified as capital improvements and a forced 5y (15y if international salary). There is not way to classify different software projects by their useful lifespan.
Section 174 was updated this way yes - which is why we’re talking about it yes?
Previously it was classifiable as an R&D expense, and could be written off the same year it was taken. Which is much friendlier, cashflow wise.
Anyone manually depreciating computers over 3 years either already has a lot of capital expenses (> 1 million/yr), or should probably get a better accountant.
There are situations it needs to be more complicated - but for the vast majority of the situations anyone reading this is going to be in, it isn’t. And if they are in that situation, they should hire a professional to help them untangle it.
jncfhnb 43 days ago [-]
Yeah, this is all made up buddy. The dollar value is not a consideration. There’s no such thing as $1M cap. Or any cap.
The salient thing here is how long they are expected to last. Super cheap items are generally not going to last very long so yes they do trend towards expensing.
There is ABSOLUTELY no requirement that a capital asset be sellable or have any market value.
You get an F-
lazide 43 days ago [-]
You need a much better accountant. Tax code section 179. With the 1 million cap. It gets adjusted, and was recently 1.222 million I believe.
“ (a) Treatment as expenses
A taxpayer may elect to treat the cost of any section 179 property as an expense which is not chargeable to capital account. Any cost so treated shall be allowed as a deduction for the taxable year in which the section 179 property is placed in service.
(b) Limitations
(1) Dollar limitation
The aggregate cost which may be taken into account under subsection (a) for any taxable year shall not exceed $1,000,000.”
For something to be considered an asset, it has to generally be “property owned by a person or company, regarded as having value and available to meet debts, commitments, or legacies.”
While there are certainly edge cases where something would be impossible to sell or value on a market but still considered an asset; that gets pretty murky for a number of reasons no?
An asset which no one would ever buy is also going to be hard to consider something which someone would take as payment for a debt, meet a commitment, or leave as a legacy. Even a pile of beany babies has some articulable value.
If it isn’t an asset, it is likely an expense.
Most businesses do not account for or attempt to track the things I’ve been calling out (hand tools, etc.) at the level they consider them assets. Any more than they track a desk or whatever. It’s de minimus.
Would they get worked up if someone walked off with them? Sure. But they aren’t depreciating their stocks of beaten up wrenches or counting their hammers each year, anymore than they are doing that for desks.
Unless they have a really bored group of bean counters or are so large they have no choice, because they literally bought like 10k desks and now that is real money.
Excavators, bobcats, etc? Yeah. Everyone is tracking those unless they’re really screwing up their taxes.
jncfhnb 43 days ago [-]
A specific election you can take is not at all the same as “you can do whatever”. Your writing heavily implied that they won’t penalize you for getting things wrong up to $1M. That’s flagrantly wrong.
Assets do not need to be sellable. Goodwill is an asset. It’s a not “real” thing. The book value is also completely unrelated to the market value.
You have quoted a dictionary definition of the word “asset” from Oxford languages off of Google. You do realize we are not talking about about generic language but specific technical accounting definitions right?
Desks are 100% capital assets. Office furniture has a specific useful life defined by the IRS. Feel free to Google this basic information.
lazide 42 days ago [-]
Nope.
That exemption means you can either track them as capital assets and depreciate them, or take them as straight up business expenses in the year you qualify.
It’s right in that first paragraph I quoted. Bullet a.
Aka ‘whatever’. You would need to decide though.
If you have a different definition of asset that includes ‘something of no market value’, then feel free to provide a reference.
If you buy something you can’t sell later for money, it isn’t an asset anymore. Its economic value has been consumed, and it was an expense.
jncfhnb 42 days ago [-]
There are some exceptions to 179, and even then it’s an election. You have specifically invoke it,
It’s not a catch all for oopsies on your taxes.
I already gave you an example. Goodwill.
lazide 42 days ago [-]
I’m really not sure what you’re trying to say. I never said it was an ‘oopsies’? In fact, I said you needed to decide which option to take. But it’s up to you.
And Goodwill is definitely sellable/marketable in most cases, as it includes a number of valuable things like IP, brand value, etc. and typically occurs to track those things when an acquisition happens and someone pays money for them.
And it gets concrete dollar amounts.
You’re just flailing around, F-. And you definitely need a better accountant.
verdverm 43 days ago [-]
> You’re building software.
It gets interesting when you think of responding to an outage. Are you "repairing" something that is broken, or "fixing" a bug and improving the software?
It's hard to analogize what we do to the historical context in which the laws were written.
> The startups crying that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes until they’re bigger can deal.
The same amount of taxes get paid, it's just about when / how it is spread out. The rule change means that the youngest and smallest companies have to bear a significant burden. For these companies, the lifespan of software is much shorter, and is arguably much more "researchy" in that we are trying out lots of things to see what works.
Large tech companies like MSFT, GOOG, APPL, ... they can manage this because they have the expert accountants and cashflows to weather the change over
erik_seaberg 43 days ago [-]
A production service is never done. You've realized less than 20% of the total cost in year one, and the payroll spend in years two through five will steadily increase as the team expands. Amortization spreads the front-loaded expense of building a factory out to the same timeframe as the revenue it brings, but software development expenses are slightly back-loaded if anything.
jncfhnb 43 days ago [-]
Amortization also spreads the back loaded expenses out to the timeframe of the revenue
addicted 43 days ago [-]
> People here love to complain about this rule but they generally don’t have any reason to justify themselves other than “it’s bad for me personally”.
Actually the justification is pretty simple.
Tech startups are the future of the country and the world. That’s how much of the wealth has been built in this country for the past few decades.
And there’s no other country in the world that taxes this way, which means that every other country has an edge over the U.S. now when it comes to tech startups (or frankly, any startup where the majority of the cost is human capital).
It’s even worse in Tech because it’s so easy to work remotely so there’s no loss to establishing a company in the UK for example.
Finally, if a country does impose a certain taxation disadvantage to itself, it’s usually a trade off against some benefit. But it’s also hard to see what the benefit is here because the government is still getting the same money over a few years span.
So it’s dumb because the impact is entirely negative. That’s why no other country has done such a dumb thing either.
acdha 43 days ago [-]
> Tech startups are the future of the country and the world. That’s how much of the wealth has been built in this country for the past few decades.
That’s certainly how founders and VCs like to justify siphoning so much money into their pockets but it’s important not to confuse share price with value. Most of the big hits were companies like Uber or DoorDash whose greatest success was reinventing old ideas with enough backing to evade law enforcement, and while they’ve made their management wealthy the positive impact on society is pretty mixed: marginal but expensive improvements in convenience with worse conditions for workers and large downsides for everyone else (e.g. Uber made traffic and pollution significantly worse and cut into transit ridership), and they’re the one in a hundred successes.
I don’t think startups are terrible but let’s not lose track of just how much money was poured into concepts which were clearly incapable of turning into a successful product (e.g. the billions spent pushing blockchains for things they’re bad at) or, especially, the ideas which might have gone somewhere if people were running lean instead of trying to cash out in the VC lottery.
jen20 43 days ago [-]
> Uber made traffic and pollution significantly worse and cut into transit ridership
Depends where, really.
In Austin (for example - but this applies to a lot of the US I suspect), it had no impact on transit because there was no worthwhile transit to have an impact upon. Instead it made drunk-driving rates plummet.
addicted 43 days ago [-]
The problem is this accounting change brings no additional dollars to the government coffers.
All it does is frontloads the money. So if your company lasts beyond 3 years you’re in basically the same position. But those first 3 years you’re far worse off. And the government makes no additional money either because the same amount is deducted, just over 3 years instead of 1.
jncfhnb 42 days ago [-]
Front loading is a form of getting additional money because of interest
Second, any startup that shuts down will never pay the taxes on the revenue they earned but nullified with expensed product building costs.
jncfhnb 43 days ago [-]
Even if you did hold this silly belief that the government should subsidize all startups, startups are not the only ones building software
verdverm 43 days ago [-]
It's not subsidizing, the same money ends up in each hands. The difference is in who needs to bear the burden of reduced cashflow.
Should it be the small, innovative companies that made & make America great? Or the government who spends too much money as it is?
One of the government's jobs is to set rules such that they incentivize certain behaviors. The tax rules can be modified to a middle ground. Put some threshold in $X millions of dollars where you no longer get the choice and let the innovators leverage the money to build more great things. Big tech has the cashflow to weather the transition from 1y to 5y. Companies who spend every dollar that comes in are having a hard time. It means hiring fewer people in one of the most important industries
jncfhnb 43 days ago [-]
I struggle not to read this in trumps voice
verdverm 42 days ago [-]
To counter, have a DonOLD rally transcript read by text-to-speech in a British accent, it's weird, you'll hear how weird the statements are
toomuchtodo 43 days ago [-]
> Tech startups are the future of the country and the world. That’s how much of the wealth has been built in this country for the past few decades.
I find this assertion a challenge to agree with. Tech startups certainly market themselves as the future, but in reality, are a vocal industry projecting outsized impact while soaking up capital for inefficient uses (products with no market fit, ecosystem participant self enrichment, etc).
> That’s how much of the wealth has been built in this country for the past few decades.
This is not necessarily a net positive. Facebook/Meta, for example. Lots of tech wealth is no different than wealth created by big oil or tobacco, and a country adverse to supporting Tech will do just fine without. Certainly, the result will be worse for founders and investors (“startup, cash in, sell out, bro down”), but not for the general public. Wealth for wealth’s sake while diffused harm is caused in the process (whether through the product offered or the inefficient burn of capital) is not an outcome to be supported by public policy.
Importantly, we have to be able to evaluate and ask ourselves: is this value? Is this innovation? Or is this just some form of performance art masquerading for the benefit of those selling us magic beans?
It’s not a capital expense because you can’t sell it! Literally no one is going to buy your garbage code, ~ever. It has zero value; in fact it has negative value — you must maintain it or risk security issues etc.
The idea that it’s comparable to capital expenses in other industries is ridiculous. Approximately no one buys code. They might buy working businesses that happen to use code for something or another. They don’t buy code.
(If you are literally selling code, sure, you can call it a capital expense. That’s approximately nobody though).
dragonwriter 42 days ago [-]
> It’s not a capital expense because you can’t sell it!
Yes, you can sell IP like code copyrights. Like a factory, you generally won't if you are able to make money with it, and also like a factory, there’s often a limited pool of buyers if you need to resort to it.
mulmen 43 days ago [-]
> Youre not deleting your repos every year.
Maybe you aren’t. Corporate America can be extremely inefficient about building software.
username135 43 days ago [-]
Thanks for the links
rightbyte 43 days ago [-]
> tl;dr - previously companies could choose 1 or 5 years to amortize
Just seeing if I got this right. A McDonalds' flipper's and a SWE's wage expense now works the same tax wise?
I mean, most of the R in RnD is abuse for tax reasons when applied to SWEs. I get that it is bad for our wages, but is the change 'fair' for some definition of fair?
jncfhnb 43 days ago [-]
> Just seeing if I got this right. A McDonalds' flipper's and a SWE's wage expense now works the same tax wise?
Exactly the opposite
A burger flipper is the cost of doing business. The value of the burger flipper is used immediately and so the expense is recognized in that year.
Software used to be treated like that. Now they say that software development is more like building tools and developing assets. So you should recognize that expense’s value across a handful of years.
jen20 43 days ago [-]
I haven't paid enough attention here, but how do system administrators fit into this?
verdverm 43 days ago [-]
Is it a deductible repair, if you aren't sure probably amortize? Ask an accountant. Either way you need to be meticulous with record keeping for hours spent on tasks, or default to amortize
It gets interesting when you think of responding to an outage. Are you "repairing" something that is broken, or "fixing" a bug and improving the software?
It's hard to analogize what we do to the historical context in which the laws were written.
jncfhnb 43 days ago [-]
If they’re not “developing” anything then it’s likely expenseable.
verdverm 42 days ago [-]
Are you adding new machines to scale up, are you deploying logging to improve visibility, are you updating packages (and thus improving the factory?)
There is a bunch of grey zone where people are not sure what to do
rightbyte 43 days ago [-]
Oh. Ye I need to read up on this.
xpl 43 days ago [-]
It's a shitshow and would definitely contribute to more U.S. layoffs and moving development abroad.
Not sure who benefits from this.
matthewdgreen 43 days ago [-]
I understood it to be a political accounting gimmick to make the total cost of the tax cuts seem lower, since the standard way to measure this cost is to use an (arbitrary) 10-year time window. Under this approach, tax deductions that would previously be claimed in year 7 would now be spread out through years 7-11 and thus wouldn’t be counted. This is also why most people seemed fine with undoing the change, because it didn’t matter. But maybe I have this wrong.
linotype 43 days ago [-]
Does anyone know where Trump and Harris stand on this? I believe this is only an issue due to the TCJA.
Rendered at 02:40:35 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
All of that is a nonsense and a distraction. The tax system is completely arbitrary and made up. It doesn’t matter whether something fits a certain definition or not. The only thing that matters are what the benefits and what the costs of doing a certain thing is.
And it’s pretty obvious that there are almost no benefits and there are massive costs to this approach.
could you disambiguate to which approach are you referring when you write "this approach" ?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
tl;dr - previously companies could choose 1 or 5 years to amortize, now no choice & clarification that most software development counts as capital improvements (like building a factory). Many smaller companies are getting surprise tax bills this year, many of us have been putting it off with standard tax deferments (6 months)
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38870429 (blog post by same Twitter user, Gergely Orosz)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38642461 (older tweet from Gergely Orosz)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34627712 (largest Ask HN discussion)
Also like building or buying a set of tools
People here love to complain about this rule but they generally don’t have any reason to justify themselves other than “it’s bad for me personally”.
You’re building software. That software is generally intended for use in the future. It is not “consumed” this year. Youre not deleting your repos every year. You’re a tech a company. Your product is an asset that you built.
There’s an argument that maintenance could be carved out but generally speaking most development is development. Triply so for startups.
The startups crying that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes until they’re bigger can deal. The only reason you have a tax bill is because you have taxable revenue.
It's only large capital expenditures (that usually can be resold for similar amounts as purchased at) that require amortization/depreciation. For example, an Excavator.
Same if you build a house, building, etc. you can expense the labor that went into it that year, as well as materials consumed in building in. [https://onekeyresources.milwaukeetool.com/en/when-to-expense...]
There are situations the labor would be considered a capital expenditure, which you can then get ROI off of, but amortizing labor costs over multiple years is a pretty odd situation.
If you couldn't, it would get reaaaaly ugly real fast, since the big challenge here is that cash gets spent this year, while it is only deductable against income taxes years later. So if I get $1mln in income now, and spend $1mln on say software R&D, i'd end up owing a bunch of taxes on the $1mln of income using cash I just don't have anymore.
In the case of an excavator or whatever, there is a sellable asset which someone can turn around and sell to get cash if there is a problem. In the case of construction labor, there is usually some improved property or accounts receivable somewhere that can be used to pay the taxes too. In software R&D there rarely is.
Outsourcing can do it though.
Then go get a loan which should be easy because you’ve demonstrated $1M revenue with 100% gross profit margin. A complete non issue and painfully unrealistic because how are you paying for the $1M capitalized expenses before you have the revenues? Yes, you have to raise funds to start a business. Shocking.
Which most banks or investors are going to be pretty hesitant to do, because cash crunch with low assets?
Some business environments, sure. Others? Not so much.
Is it impossible? Hopefully not. But is is a major change from how it used to work.
Which is why there is such a huge push for offshoring.
As stated, without some significant changes that company is doomed in short order with the new rules.
Software dev as 'opex' (actually R&D, which had the same treatment as opex) == the old way. 800k in 'income' you've already spent to do what your company exists to do, but have to pay taxes on this year == the new way.
On a cash accounting basis it’s actually worse, because that company is seriously in the red after paying taxes with the new rules. Previously it would have netted out at $0.
Of course someone is going to be hesitant to loan money in that situation, unless you can cut those expenses. Which if you’re in a highly competitive market could mean death to your company.
Is it overly simplistic? No shit, it’s an example to illustrate why startups are getting worked up right now because they have sudden cashflow issues. And why larger companies are also doing layoffs and trying very hard to reduce their software dev spend. Including outsourcing, where they can.
Because the actual way most companies will solve this once they figure it out is to not spend all their cash on software dev, and instead reduce it significantly.
Because this new treatment means instead of being able to write income off as a straight business expense in the year they spent it, they have to pay taxes on money they’ve already spent in that year, and then can only make it up fractionally after that.
So in the example I gave? Companies taxes that year are zero with the prior R&D rules. They had zero taxable income.
With the updates to section 174, now they owe taxes on $800k of taxable income the first year.
Huge difference.
They can still eventually write off the whole $1mln they spent in year one, but that is a hell of a big difference in cash flow. Even if dev spend is flat for 5 years, it will take that long for it to look the same cash flow wise. And it’s rarely ever actually flat.
And that is not even taking into account the increased cost of money going on, tightening access to credit. If you pulled off this situation while being in a safe industry that a bank will write a loan for you easily, then cool.
But they’re surprisingly weird sometimes, and if you’re in year one it can be hard to get anyone to return your calls at all if there is anything ‘non-traditional’ about you. Which is most startups.And the ‘startup banks’ where it was easy (SVB and first republic) all got nuked.
So you could easily end up paying 25% APR on short term financing to close this gap, if anyone is talking to you at all.
No, it’s not. Net income here is $800k (20% amortization). Gross income is $1M. Because accounting recognizes that the value of your investments today are useful next year. If you sold a million dollars of your software this year, it’s extremely likely that you will be able to sell the same software next year. You’re not starting from scratch in 2025.
> On a cash accounting basis it’s actually worse, because that company is seriously in the red after paying taxes with the new rules. Previously it would have netted out at $0.
And that’s an example of why cash based accounting is not they way businesses track their financials. It’s misleading.
Your understanding of finance here is completely backwards. Think about it. Would you rather loan money to a company that paid $1M contractors to do work for $1M in revenue? Or to a company that spent $1M building a product that sold $1M in services that year?
Obviously, OBVIOUSLY, the second one is more enticing. The contractor company is extracting zero profit and is poised to do the same next year. The software company built a product and they can continue selling. Whether the market is really competitive and whether they might need to continue investing in the product to stay competitive is a tangential concern and a secondary consideration about the business environment that does not factor into our basic understanding of assets here.
Whining about funding being hard to get or that business is hard does not define what an asset is. Imagine a factory owner saying “well the Chinese just built an automated factory so I’ll need to double my investment next year to make sure my products can compete in the market, so I’m going to say that my building of factory doesn’t count as an investment because that just works out nicer for me. It’s only fair. The business environment is competitive!”
Because in theory sure.
Though previously there was the far more profitable and easy to deal with theory of building an actual asset of large value (monetized via stock/equity) while treating the expenses to do it as straightforward business expenses with no amortization to be a PITA, and the IRS was willing to go along on that.
In practice, this is exactly how you run your startup into a wall at 100 mph while you bounce payroll checks and end up in a morass of legal trouble. Because cashflow absolutely matters, and startups and small businesses rarely can just get ‘free’ debt at a moments notice to smooth it all out. Even large ones are having more difficulty than ever.
Call it whining all you want - it’s a significant concern partially driving market behavior. Remote work also meaning outsourcing is back on the table being another.
“Business is hard” is not an argument to redefine what an asset is
Because this was all due to a change of the rules on existing behaviors, and created a new capital asset which previously didn’t need to be recognized.
And because you seem to be saying ‘suck it up’, which of course sure whatever. Business is what it is, and folks get what they get.
But of course what is going to happen is the related companies are just going to fire some people/lay them off, or go bankrupt and then do that to everyone.
I don’t actually care - I pivoted in a way it benefits me several years back - but what else does anyone expect to happen?
Then the whining and finger pointing happens of course on the state of the labor market, and no one ever points one back to themselves. shrug
That is not true in the U.S. All capital assets must be depreciated. This includes all tools and equipment except for very short life consumables (< 1 year).
Why do you think they should? Care to quote a section of the tax code?
No one, including the IRS, wants to deal with mountains of BS paperwork over small stuff like this.
For a description [https://www.trustbgw.com/blog/2016/07/08/capitalize-fixed-as....],
“To determine when to expense and when to capitalize, consider both the de minimus rule and the useful economic life.
The de minimis rule allows you to expense any item that may potentially be capitalized so long as said expense (or the sum of related expenses) does not significantly distort your bottom line. In other words, these expenses cannot make up a large percentage of your total expenses, subsequently providing you with an extraordinarily low income. A strong metric to follow is that the sum of the expenses should be less than 0.1% of your gross receipts for the year, and/or 2% of your total depreciation and amortization expense for the year.
Any item that will retain no value after 12 months may be expensed. Do note that the IRS may frown upon deductions that appear to take advantage of end-of-year timing. If you incur an expense in December and then consume the item in January, you may need to argue that the deduction did not distort your bottom line in order to take it.“
The de minimus rule is, as your own quote indicates, for a tiny, tiny subset of your assets.
That is paperwork. Unless your tax folks are just yolo’ing amounts into the appropriate fields in your taxes anyway, in which case you’ve got bigger problems.
You are correct that it doesn’t necessarily require going out and tracking say every individual desk.
But to depreciate it, you would need to be able to show you bought x desks for y $$ (and those were reasonable business expenses), including receipts, and if the IRS got worked up, they might demand to see said desks. Which if you had no idea where they were, is going to be hard eh?
And then you need to track them over the period of time you’re depreciating them (and how much was depreciated).
Which for a small business is not worth the hassle at all.
And it is highly unlikely the amount they spent on said desks is not de minimus.
If you are IBM or sprint or whatever? Then sure. That is why they have massive accounting departments, asset tag everything, etc.
Even they don’t bother with hand tools and the like for tax purposes though.
they can’t do things the easy (and legal) way.
Not ones that you build.
For it to be a capital expense they'd need to be large, sellable assets. For example, formwork? Jigs (except for something really exceptionally expensive perhaps)? Hand tools? Less-expensive-than-a-truck custom machinery? Not a problem to write off as a normal expense.
'Gigapress'? Yeah, thats a capital investment/expense.
The difference here is 'is this something you built/bought to get a job done' (aka an expense), or 'is this a large valuable asset (with a market value)'. It's a sliding scale with many exceptions.
Someones $100k snap-on set for example MIGHT be considered a Capital expense, not a normal business expense, depending on the circumstances and scale.
There is a pretty sizable cap too where you can do whatever and not worry about it too much, a bit over $1mln if I remember correctly.
What changed is that almost all software development was classified as capital improvements and a forced 5y (15y if international salary). There is not way to classify different software projects by their useful lifespan.
Section 174 was updated this way yes - which is why we’re talking about it yes?
Previously it was classifiable as an R&D expense, and could be written off the same year it was taken. Which is much friendlier, cashflow wise.
Anyone manually depreciating computers over 3 years either already has a lot of capital expenses (> 1 million/yr), or should probably get a better accountant.
There are situations it needs to be more complicated - but for the vast majority of the situations anyone reading this is going to be in, it isn’t. And if they are in that situation, they should hire a professional to help them untangle it.
The salient thing here is how long they are expected to last. Super cheap items are generally not going to last very long so yes they do trend towards expensing.
There is ABSOLUTELY no requirement that a capital asset be sellable or have any market value.
You get an F-
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/179]
“ (a) Treatment as expenses A taxpayer may elect to treat the cost of any section 179 property as an expense which is not chargeable to capital account. Any cost so treated shall be allowed as a deduction for the taxable year in which the section 179 property is placed in service.
(b) Limitations (1) Dollar limitation The aggregate cost which may be taken into account under subsection (a) for any taxable year shall not exceed $1,000,000.”
[https://www.executech.com/insights/1-million-deduction-for-n...]
For something to be considered an asset, it has to generally be “property owned by a person or company, regarded as having value and available to meet debts, commitments, or legacies.”
While there are certainly edge cases where something would be impossible to sell or value on a market but still considered an asset; that gets pretty murky for a number of reasons no?
An asset which no one would ever buy is also going to be hard to consider something which someone would take as payment for a debt, meet a commitment, or leave as a legacy. Even a pile of beany babies has some articulable value.
If it isn’t an asset, it is likely an expense.
Most businesses do not account for or attempt to track the things I’ve been calling out (hand tools, etc.) at the level they consider them assets. Any more than they track a desk or whatever. It’s de minimus.
Would they get worked up if someone walked off with them? Sure. But they aren’t depreciating their stocks of beaten up wrenches or counting their hammers each year, anymore than they are doing that for desks.
Unless they have a really bored group of bean counters or are so large they have no choice, because they literally bought like 10k desks and now that is real money.
Excavators, bobcats, etc? Yeah. Everyone is tracking those unless they’re really screwing up their taxes.
Assets do not need to be sellable. Goodwill is an asset. It’s a not “real” thing. The book value is also completely unrelated to the market value.
You have quoted a dictionary definition of the word “asset” from Oxford languages off of Google. You do realize we are not talking about about generic language but specific technical accounting definitions right?
Desks are 100% capital assets. Office furniture has a specific useful life defined by the IRS. Feel free to Google this basic information.
That exemption means you can either track them as capital assets and depreciate them, or take them as straight up business expenses in the year you qualify.
It’s right in that first paragraph I quoted. Bullet a.
Aka ‘whatever’. You would need to decide though.
If you have a different definition of asset that includes ‘something of no market value’, then feel free to provide a reference.
If you buy something you can’t sell later for money, it isn’t an asset anymore. Its economic value has been consumed, and it was an expense.
I already gave you an example. Goodwill.
And Goodwill is definitely sellable/marketable in most cases, as it includes a number of valuable things like IP, brand value, etc. and typically occurs to track those things when an acquisition happens and someone pays money for them.
And it gets concrete dollar amounts.
You’re just flailing around, F-. And you definitely need a better accountant.
It gets interesting when you think of responding to an outage. Are you "repairing" something that is broken, or "fixing" a bug and improving the software?
It's hard to analogize what we do to the historical context in which the laws were written.
> The startups crying that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes until they’re bigger can deal.
The same amount of taxes get paid, it's just about when / how it is spread out. The rule change means that the youngest and smallest companies have to bear a significant burden. For these companies, the lifespan of software is much shorter, and is arguably much more "researchy" in that we are trying out lots of things to see what works.
Large tech companies like MSFT, GOOG, APPL, ... they can manage this because they have the expert accountants and cashflows to weather the change over
Actually the justification is pretty simple.
Tech startups are the future of the country and the world. That’s how much of the wealth has been built in this country for the past few decades.
And there’s no other country in the world that taxes this way, which means that every other country has an edge over the U.S. now when it comes to tech startups (or frankly, any startup where the majority of the cost is human capital).
It’s even worse in Tech because it’s so easy to work remotely so there’s no loss to establishing a company in the UK for example.
Finally, if a country does impose a certain taxation disadvantage to itself, it’s usually a trade off against some benefit. But it’s also hard to see what the benefit is here because the government is still getting the same money over a few years span.
So it’s dumb because the impact is entirely negative. That’s why no other country has done such a dumb thing either.
That’s certainly how founders and VCs like to justify siphoning so much money into their pockets but it’s important not to confuse share price with value. Most of the big hits were companies like Uber or DoorDash whose greatest success was reinventing old ideas with enough backing to evade law enforcement, and while they’ve made their management wealthy the positive impact on society is pretty mixed: marginal but expensive improvements in convenience with worse conditions for workers and large downsides for everyone else (e.g. Uber made traffic and pollution significantly worse and cut into transit ridership), and they’re the one in a hundred successes.
I don’t think startups are terrible but let’s not lose track of just how much money was poured into concepts which were clearly incapable of turning into a successful product (e.g. the billions spent pushing blockchains for things they’re bad at) or, especially, the ideas which might have gone somewhere if people were running lean instead of trying to cash out in the VC lottery.
Depends where, really.
In Austin (for example - but this applies to a lot of the US I suspect), it had no impact on transit because there was no worthwhile transit to have an impact upon. Instead it made drunk-driving rates plummet.
All it does is frontloads the money. So if your company lasts beyond 3 years you’re in basically the same position. But those first 3 years you’re far worse off. And the government makes no additional money either because the same amount is deducted, just over 3 years instead of 1.
Second, any startup that shuts down will never pay the taxes on the revenue they earned but nullified with expensed product building costs.
Should it be the small, innovative companies that made & make America great? Or the government who spends too much money as it is?
One of the government's jobs is to set rules such that they incentivize certain behaviors. The tax rules can be modified to a middle ground. Put some threshold in $X millions of dollars where you no longer get the choice and let the innovators leverage the money to build more great things. Big tech has the cashflow to weather the transition from 1y to 5y. Companies who spend every dollar that comes in are having a hard time. It means hiring fewer people in one of the most important industries
I find this assertion a challenge to agree with. Tech startups certainly market themselves as the future, but in reality, are a vocal industry projecting outsized impact while soaking up capital for inefficient uses (products with no market fit, ecosystem participant self enrichment, etc).
> That’s how much of the wealth has been built in this country for the past few decades.
This is not necessarily a net positive. Facebook/Meta, for example. Lots of tech wealth is no different than wealth created by big oil or tobacco, and a country adverse to supporting Tech will do just fine without. Certainly, the result will be worse for founders and investors (“startup, cash in, sell out, bro down”), but not for the general public. Wealth for wealth’s sake while diffused harm is caused in the process (whether through the product offered or the inefficient burn of capital) is not an outcome to be supported by public policy.
Importantly, we have to be able to evaluate and ask ourselves: is this value? Is this innovation? Or is this just some form of performance art masquerading for the benefit of those selling us magic beans?
The idea that it’s comparable to capital expenses in other industries is ridiculous. Approximately no one buys code. They might buy working businesses that happen to use code for something or another. They don’t buy code.
(If you are literally selling code, sure, you can call it a capital expense. That’s approximately nobody though).
Yes, you can sell IP like code copyrights. Like a factory, you generally won't if you are able to make money with it, and also like a factory, there’s often a limited pool of buyers if you need to resort to it.
Maybe you aren’t. Corporate America can be extremely inefficient about building software.
Just seeing if I got this right. A McDonalds' flipper's and a SWE's wage expense now works the same tax wise?
I mean, most of the R in RnD is abuse for tax reasons when applied to SWEs. I get that it is bad for our wages, but is the change 'fair' for some definition of fair?
Exactly the opposite
A burger flipper is the cost of doing business. The value of the burger flipper is used immediately and so the expense is recognized in that year.
Software used to be treated like that. Now they say that software development is more like building tools and developing assets. So you should recognize that expense’s value across a handful of years.
It gets interesting when you think of responding to an outage. Are you "repairing" something that is broken, or "fixing" a bug and improving the software?
It's hard to analogize what we do to the historical context in which the laws were written.
There is a bunch of grey zone where people are not sure what to do
Not sure who benefits from this.