Three years ago we began building a customer portal for our contract warehousing clients. Like most of our development work, the time my team and our contractors spent on it was capitalised. Finance treats software we build as an asset, spreads its cost over the years we expect to use it, and does not charge it against profit while it is being built. By its second year the portal was clearly in trouble. Clients had moved to integrating directly with our systems rather than logging into anythi...