This is starting to sound very similar to mark-to-market accounting, and the one word associated with "mark-to-market" is "Enron".
From http://www.creditpulse.com/accountingfinance/lessons-enron/e...
> Basically, mark-to-market is a type of accounting that enables a company to book the value of an asset or a liability, not based on the cost of that asset, but based on current market valuations or perceived changes in market valuations.
What got Enron started down the path to ruin is the SEC granted them a waiver where they could start pricing their projects by their perceived value. Problem was, the perceived value was anything that Enron said it was. So that let Enron inflate their holdings, which gave them access to more capital, which let them keep on inflating their holdings until the whole thing came crashing down.
Of course, the asset values weren't just what Enron said they were. They had auditors backing up their claims. One of the Big 5 financial auditors. And as a result, Arthur Anderson also went down in flames along with Enron.
So, in your case, who decides what the LTV of customer cash flows is? The Enron lesson is let speculators use their hunches to guess the future, but keep that speculation out of the official accounting documents.
From Wikipedia:
Mark-to-market (MTM or M2M) or fair value accounting refers to accounting for the "fair value" of an asset or liability based on the current market price, or the price for similar assets and liabilities, or based on another objectively assessed "fair" value.[1] Fair value accounting has been a part of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) in the United States since the early 1990s, and is now regarded as the "gold standard" in some circles.
However the idea you point out is why on the stock market people value companies completely differently than their book value. It would be pretty interesting if there was a standardized balance sheet like document that could be made with projected value.
By not depreciating sales and marketing, Slack can claim all of that expense upfront, and delay tax payments since they show a greater loss.
That being said, specific marketing costs already are amortized over the life of contracts - if you pay commissions to sales staff, those are allocated over the life of the contracts that are signed. If you pay inducements (such as free months of service, or whatever), those are amortized over the life of the contract. However, general marketing expenses like ads are recognized in the period that they occur. There are a number of reasons for this: maybe adtech can decide who saw what ad and made a purchase because of it, but that is generally hard to tell. The other is that how do you know what the life of the contract will be. Your company pays $1000/year for Slack, and you likely will, but what if something changes? Slack can't know what you're planning to do. They'd have to make an estimate, and estimates are open to manipulation by management.
Management's incentive is to decrease expenses in the current year to make themselves look better to investors, so they're going to say that their expenses will be good for 20 years. How can they be certain? There's also the other way they can manipulate it by saying that "oh, this was a bad year already, we might as well recognize marketing expenses now to make a bad year worse, so next year looks better". Since there's no actual measurement basis, there's no corroborating evidence either way.
Source: am an auditor, albeit not familiar with US GAAP.
You can't export your data from Slack?
Email is non-sticky (just take your emails/save them on client and leave) Files storage is non-sticky (just move your files from OneDrive to GDrive) Chat/Collaboration is sticky as mud.
Maybe you should think about a formal method of documenting important decisions for your company instead of relying on a chat log.
"Hey, I just purchased 20k of widgets"
"What? Why?! We can't afford that! We decided to discontinue those widgets month ago! Didn't you scroll through the chat logs before making that purchase order??!"
Good luck.
You can. Nicely it can be had as json. But it's really only half useful since there are links and attachments that point within Slack itself and that content is not captured in the export without additional processing.
If your company serves free coffee, operating the coffee machine likely costs more.
There's no financial incentive to leave Slack at this price point.
What was your company using before Slack and what did it cost?
We came up with the concept of depreciation/amortization as a way to better match up expenses with revenues in a given time frame.
I think we need a similar mechanism for allocating sales & marketing costs.
My company spends about $1,000/year on Slack. We likely will in perpetuity, as long as we/Slack exists.
Slack spent marketing/CAC dollars on us all the way back in 2014 to acquire our LTV stream of cash flows.
If you "depreciated" Slack's sales and marketing costs ($104M, $140M, $223M) over the LTV of the average customer, they would show massive profitability already, and even greater profitability in the future.
We do this already with depreciation - why not with sales and marketing for recurring revenue software companies?