It depends – you can generally expense anything you buy over it&#x27;s useful lifetime, so if you aquire a patent for your new project, you&#x27;ll spread that investment over the next few years. If you hire an architect, it&#x27;s part of the building&#x27;s cost.<p>The only exemption I&#x27;ve ever encountered is intellectual property that you create with employees – there&#x27;d be just too much uncertainty over it&#x27;s value so you suffer those costs immediately (which can be a good thing, it lowers your taxes etc).<p>But yes, if you&#x27;re investing a lot there will be some negative effect from the beginning because everything starts losing value immediately and revenue only starts later.<p>Note that all this is completely removed from cash flow. You&#x27;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&#x27;s why companies often prefer to lease cars or machinery: it gets the different cycles in sync.<p>(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)