Accounting and Financial Reporting, ERP Systems and Technology

The Hard Truth on Soft Assets

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In the past decade the landscape shifted yet again, this time to the cloud. And of course, by definition, the cloud means no physical infrastructure. States and localities now subscribe to cloudbased IT services to, in effect, pay to use someone else’s servers and software. That’s a massive conceptual shift. If there’s no physical asset, is there still a capital asset?

With Statement No. 96, GASB’s answer was “basically, yes.” Today, most states and localities procure their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other essential cloud-based IT capacity through contracts broadly known as subscription-based information technology arrangements (SBITAs).


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