How capitalization milestones are identified

Determining the start and end of the development phase of capitalized projects in a consistent way is one of the more challenging parts of the process for accounting teams, especially at scale.

Neo.Tax has developed a standard approach to recommend milestones automatically by looking for key indicators of the milestones in the ticketing data.

This gives teams a consistent approach while retaining the flexibility to adjust based on additional context.

How this works:

Capitalization start:

Key signals: Minimum threshold of development-focused tickets.

In most cases this will closely align with the project start in the ticketing system, since the preliminary phase work around feasibility and requirement creation typically takes place outside of JIRA systems.

The capitalization start will then be set to the month where this minimum threshold is detected.

Capitalization end:

Key signals: Keywords in the tickets that signal release to production and general availability. The share of bug and maintenance tickets also factors into to the determination as those show evidence of general availability.

Capitalization end will then be set to the month where the release signals cross the threshold.

When no release signals are detected and the project remains active, the capitalization end date will remain blank.

Example:

The highlighted ticket would be identified as a release milestone and the capitalization end for the project would be set to July 2024.

If a capitalized project ends without a release milestone, the capitalization end date will be set based on the end of the project.