There are strict rules about recognising IP on a balance sheet to stop you from just slapping some value on your own work and saying "Yep, we're worth a billion

There are strict rules about recognising IP on a balance sheet to stop you from just slapping some value on your own work and saying "Yep, we're worth a billion dollars!". There are some cases you can do it though, mainly they involve acquisitions of companies or of the IP which allows you to accurately determine a market value for the IP. The other way is capitalising expenses associated with developing IP, which I'm assuming since your on HN is software. It's been a while since I was in this space, but you can often capitalise software development expenses under certain conditions. I found this link which outlines this in more detail: https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/capitalization-of-software-development-costs.html https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/capitalization-of-s...