October 18, 2022
New Tool Enables Financial and Engineering Leaders to Automatically Track, Calculate and Report Financial Impact of Engineering Teams’ Work in Precise, Auditable Way. Integral Ad Science, Optimizely, and ZoomInfo Among First Adopters.
BOSTON, October 18, 2022 – Jellyfish, the leading Engineering Management Platform (EMP), today announced the launch of a new R&D cost reporting tool for financial and engineering leaders to easily report on the capital costs of engineering effort in a highly accurate and auditable way. The company’s newest offering, Jellyfish DevFinOps, builds upon Jellyfish’s data model to help existing and new customers categorize and capitalize software development costs and even improve profitability over time.
The Cost Capitalization Conundrum
As digital experiences increasingly drive new revenue streams for many businesses, software development costs can be treated as capitalizable investments, and can be categorized as depreciable assets on a company’s balance sheet. Roughly 57 percent of publicly traded software companies in the U.S. capitalize some percentage of their R&D spend, and consequently reap financial benefits, including increased profitability and tax advantages. Startups with significant R&D costs also benefit as they could attract more investor capital needed to improve valuations.
Until today, engineering leaders were challenged by the task of calculating and categorizing R&D costs in order to capitalize them. This is because these efforts can be extremely time and labor intensive, as well as inconsistent and inaccurate, often requiring manual time tracking and even guesswork by engineers and managers. Leveraging Jellyfish DevFinOps for R&D cost reporting streamlines the process to provide an auditable measurement of the amount of engineering effort spent on capitalizable projects.
“As software increasingly drives growth across industries, companies are investing key capital and time resources in engineering labor, not just tangible assets,” said Andrew Lau, CEO of Jellyfish. “With Jellyfish’s R&D cost reporting solution, finance and engineering leaders can easily report on the capital costs of product development in a precise and auditable way. Jellyfish offers visibility into the real financial impact of an engineering team’s work, empowering growing tech companies to drive revenue, increase valuations, and attract investment.”
Automated and Defensible R&D Capitalization Reporting Is Here
Managing R&D cost reporting with Jellyfish allows engineering leaders to work closely with finance teams to create auditable reports on engineering efforts. Using Jellyfish’s patented Allocations data model, the new tool reduces time spent by engineers and accountants on manual compilations of time sheets and other tracking tools, dramatically simplifying data capture, collation, classification, and reporting processes.
Jellyfish DevFinOps accomplishes this by:
- Implementing a consistent and accurate platform to calculate engineering effort with a standard-setting work allocation model
- Automating data collection and reporting across multiple groups, teams, and projects, eliminating the time and expense required for manual time tracking or estimates
- Expediting the tedious categorization of capitalizable R&D costs versus non-capitalizable costs
- Ensuring consistency and improving predictability of capitalized R&D costs via automated reporting and export into consumable file types for controllers and accountants
- Providing defensible evidence of costs for audits with comprehensive reporting at the person- and effort-level with direct access to supporting detail
Customers Find Real Value in Cost Capitalization
Customers, including Integral Ad Science, Optimizely, and ZoomInfo, are utilizing Jellyfish for R&D cost reporting, automating many tasks associated with the capitalization of R&D costs.
R&D cost reporting with Jellyfish DevFinOps is generally available today. For more information, visit:
Read the “What is DevFinOps” blog post
About Jellyfish
Jellyfish is the leading Engineering Management Platform that enables engineering leaders to align engineering work with strategic business objectives. By analyzing engineering signals and contextual business data, Jellyfish provides complete visibility into engineering organizations, the work they do, and how they operate. Companies like Mastercard, Priceline, ZoomInfo and PagerDuty use Jellyfish to optimize the allocation of engineering resources to focus their teams on what matters most to the business. For more information, visit www.jellyfish.co.
