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Capitalize software development costs

Use developer activity data from Swarmia to generate capitalization reports and blend with cost data.

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Last updated 1 day ago

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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

Report on software capitalization based on your Swarmia data.

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

This feature is only available for admin users.

First-time setup

This feature is in self-serve beta. Please contact us via hello@swarmia.com or the in-app chat if you have any questions regarding capitalization or the feature.

Software capitalization reporting is based on issue filter rules for selecting capitalizable work. As part of setting up this feature, you'll need to configure your rules.

A typical way of doing this is via a Jira custom field connected to capitalizable initiatives or epics.

Building reports

  1. Copy the reporting template from the same view

  2. Import the Swarmia data to the reporting template (see instructions in the README)

    1. Optional: blend in cost information for more accurate cost reporting

Frequently asked questions

Q: Can I manually categorize work into my capitalizable investment category?

A: Yes, you can manually mark individual work items as capitalizable in the issue drill down.

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.

You can configure the filter rules in .

Navigate to Swarmia to

Software Capitalization settings
export your software capitalization reporting data
How software capitalization works in Swarmia
Swarmia - Software capitalization