Our company provides hosted SaaS which we recognize under ASU 2009-13 via BESP.
Currently, we capitalize "direct & incremental costs" - such as commission to the sales people, 3rd party costs, etc - and then amortize them over the revenue generating life of the contract.
We do not capitalize the hours our implementation engineers spend working on the actual set up (which we do track and can attach a $$ figure to by customer and contract) - because our auditors say they are not "direct & incremental"
Does anyone else who sells hosted SaaS capitalize & amortize the labor costs associated with bringing a customer on board? If so, what guidance/interpretations are you relying on?
Many company's 10-ks (for hosted SaaS company’s) say the do capitalize implementation costs - but they don’t actually spell out if it includes labor or not, which of course is the biggest component in our installations.
If we can track & capitalize software development costs for creating intangibles under ASC 350-40, why can't we capitalize & amortize the set up costs for our customer installations? What's the fundamental difference?
Thanks