It depends – you can generally expense anything you buy over it's useful lifetime, so if you aquire a patent for your new project, you'll spread that investment

It depends – you can generally expense anything you buy over it's useful lifetime, so if you aquire a patent for your new project, you'll spread that investment over the next few years. If you hire an architect, it's part of the building's cost. The only exemption I've ever encountered is intellectual property that you create with employees – there'd be just too much uncertainty over it's value so you suffer those costs immediately (which can be a good thing, it lowers your taxes etc). But yes, if you're investing a lot there will be some negative effect from the beginning because everything starts losing value immediately and revenue only starts later. Note that all this is completely removed from cash flow. You'll have to pay for all the stuff you buy – usually pretty quickly. There have been companies with excellent balance sheets which still ran out of money because all the value was in illiquid investments. That's why companies often prefer to lease cars or machinery: it gets the different cycles in sync. (all based on the laws of my small European country. Not endorsed by GAAP. Lack of acronyms caused by inexplicable loss of the relevant vocabulary once I got away from all the CXXs)