[throwawaymaths]

It also lets a CFO convert capex to opex (may or may not have tax implications), and you eliminate a cost center from your balance sheets (and turns it into service payments) which makes CFOs look better, even if it's net worse for the Company

[dijit]

CFO's don't care about CapEx vs OpEx.

At least mine doesn't seem to care even slightly, nor did my previous one.

I'm fairly certain this is an argument that we in the tech community make because we heard someone else make it.

When asking finance people blankly: having capital expenditure on the books is not a problem.

[throwawaymaths]

Ok. I guess I just worked for one CFO that obsessed about it, so for me n=1

[dijit]

Well, n=2 for me, but that's not to say you're wrong.

I reached the conclusion that it's basically a self-perpetuating myth because I asked my CFO's directly about it because it comes up often.

Curious though: where are you based? My CFO's were German and... German (but the second was working in Sweden with Swedish financial rules)

Maybe it is actually different depending on location or there's some other factor at play?

[throwawaymaths]

USA. So we have weird tax rules. Also I dunno the CFO could have been drinking the sales teams coolaid (we were also trying to sell enterprise to move to the cloud). And there was a lot of drinking (and hookers and probably blow) at that company