Capitalize software development costs

Accounting and engineering rarely meet, but in modern software development organizations, that sometimes becomes a must. When software development costs are treated as long-term assets, it's essential to accurately connect effort with specific projects.

Swarmia helps organizations track and report on capitalizable software development costs with precision:

• We connect data from your Git and issue tracker to accurately understand how developers allocate their time. Data accuracy is ensured because your developers regularly view and verify their activity in Swarmia.

• You can define custom rules to match what work qualifies as capitalizable

• Your finance team can export monthly or yearly software capitalization reports

Using Swarmia

Swarmia automatically generates monthly reports based on developer activity, issue hierarchy, and capitalization rules. You can manually generate data and override the previous snapshot for the given month.

Setting up your categorization

Software capitalization reporting can be configured by categorizing issues manually or setting issue filters to categorize them automatically. You may even use a combination of these.

Manual categorization

Manual categorization works well if you capitalize a small number of large projects annually. These projects are easily identified in the work tab and marked "Capitalizable." When you categorize issues manually, you'll see a small hand icon next to the category.

Automatic categorization

Automatic categorization works best if you already have clear categories in your issue tracker and want to transfer them to Swarmia. On the setup tab, you'll find a section called "Rules for software capitalization," where you can configure filters to identify capitalizable work.

Reviewing your capitalizable work

Swarmia gives you two different ways to review your capitalization data before exporting.

The work tab allows you to examine issues and see how much of each is marked as capitalizable. The issues are grouped at the highest level, which means the capitalization percentage represents how much of the work grouped underneath is capitalizable.

If you've set automatic categorization rules and see a lower-than-expected capitalization percentage, it is likely because child items do not match your rules.

The employees tab shows individual contributors and their respective capitalization percentages. This means how much of their total accumulated effort is directed towards capitalizable issues. This view also shows excluded days (time offs and inactive days), which lower a contributor's accumulated effort. You can find more on this topic in the effort article.

Building reports

Once you've categorized work (either manually or automatically), reports will automatically be generated and delivered to the reports tab. In this view, you'll find monthly and yearly exports. The exports are split into employees (yearly) and capitalization (yearly/monthly) files.

You can use these files as raw data or alternatively, compile them into a capitalization report using our reporting template. To use the reporting template, copy it by clicking the "Copy reporting template" button on the reports tab and follow the instructions inside.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Can the work be aggregated by a specific Jira issue type in the software capitalization report?

A: It's not possible right now, but we're going to add support for this in the future. Currently, the work is aggregated by the highest-level issue that we can find from your Jira issue hierarchy. However, you can already see the FTE values for any of your issues from Swarmia's UI.

Q: What's the optional "additional info" field in software capitalization settings?

A: It is an extra column in the work export that provides more context about the capitalizable project (e.g., the reason for capitalization, and the capitalization date).

Concretely, it's a field in your Jira issues, e.g. a label or a custom field, that's pulled to the capitalizable work export as a separate column. It can be used for custom reporting purposes if you don't prefer to use software capitalization reporting template.

Q: Can I convert the software capitalization reporting template to a .xlsx file?

A: It's not possible right now as some of the formulas used in the Google Sheet reporting template are not available on Microsoft Excel. We're planning to build a reporting template for Excel in the future.