Comment by anigbrowl 7 days ago
The answer to all these questions is yes, i don't see the point in trying to obfuscate this with artificial complexity.
What about HR, etc who use excel documents?
IF they are using it rather than developing it, no. If they put in 5 hours a week writing code, yes for those 5 hours. This isn't hard.
I'm pretty sure it's because other industries wondered why they were having to spread such costs over 5 years while software firms were able to write them all down at once. It's not that I have a strong opinion about this either way (I'm not running or employed in a business where this matters), but that ultimately this is a philosophical argument. There isn't an objectively correct way to do this, how you view it is down to what your economic interests happen to be.
It's the other way around. Software used to be special, in that money the company spent to improve its internal processes by, say, buying a calculator had to be amortized, while money spent on developing software automation were not.
What if they literally just write a post-it note of how to perform certain actions? Are those 5 minutes capital investment? The information on that scrap of paper is subject to copyright and is a company asset in just the same way as a script. Where do they draw the line?
So now every engineer has to record how many hours each day were spent doing "software development" vs. "software maintenance"/"overhead"/"etc..."?
This is common in Canada for companies claiming SR&ED credits: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/scientific-...
Why?
They're suggesting you spend a minute or two per month thinking about it, not meticulous tracking.
That might not be practical, but what they are describing is a perfectly good use of the word "just".
Okay so your random HR person at a nontechnical small to medium sized business now is on the line for developing spreadsheets to manage scheduling.
OR they need to maintain a set of activity codes and a timesheet outlining how many hours (or partial hours) each week are spent on what types of tasks.
It's unnecessary complexity if you want to be in actual compliance with the tax code vs just guessing whether XYZ task is on one side of the line vs the other and hoping it doesn't come back to bite you later.