Go-to-market (GTM) accounting may soon be very different.
Every quarter, GTM spending gets tucked into operating expenses on the P&L. It sits beside payroll and rent, treated as if it were just one other cost of doing business—that’s the accounting treatment. But economically, it’s a fiction.
GTM doesn’t behave like OpEx. It behaves like CapEx. It is front-loaded, dangerous, and deployed with the expectation of multi-period returns. And when it fails, it doesn’t simply vanish — it leaves behind stranded, impaired capital. That is one among the the explanation why GAAP rules across the treatment of GTM expense may soon change.
It needs to change because every dollar of customer acquisition cost (CAC) is debt.
The current accounting method has marketing and sales writing “promissory notes” against future customer money flows. If the cash arrives, the debt gets serviced. If it doesn’t, the debt defaults, and shareholder capital eats the loss.
For CEOs and CFOs, this is not a semantic trick. It is a governance reality, and ignoring it invites fiduciary risk.
GTM as CapEx in disguise
Think about the way you treat constructing a factory. It’s recorded as CapEx, depreciated and tracked against its expected return. Everyone recognizes it as a capital allocation decision with consequences.
GTM works the identical way. The commissions, campaigns, events, enablement programs and onboarding all hit before a single dollar of customer revenue arrives. Repayment comes later, through renewals, expansions and margin flow across years. When churn cuts that cycle short, the capital is stranded — no different from a shuttered plant.
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However, CAC is an obligation, and debt requires reimbursement. When you spend to acquire a customer, you incur a liability that have to be repaid from future customer money flows. If repayment doesn’t come, the “loan” defaults, and the loss falls to shareholders.
Why finance becomes the underwriter
In theory, B2B marketing and sales should underwrite these notes. They should have the opportunity to evaluate repayment curves, time decay, churn risk and opportunity cost. But in practice, they can’t. They lack the mindset, tools and credibility.
That means finance becomes the de facto underwriter of GTM risk. It’s not a role finance asked for, nevertheless it’s where fiduciary responsibility lands. Finance must:
- Demand fully loaded CAC numbers, not cherry-picked ones.
- Model repayment velocity and churn-adjusted breakeven.
- Compare GTM use of capital against alternative deployments.
- Stress-test CAC portfolios under hostile conditions.
In other words, finance has to run GTM budgeting like a credit committee — deciding which notes to issue, which to deny and at what cost.
The lie of underreported CAC
Most CAC numbers shown in decks are fiction. They are stripped down to look efficient — campaign spend is counted, but commissions, onboarding, martech and overhead are ignored.
The truth is that if it takes money to bring a customer to breakeven, it belongs in CAC. That means every GTM expense is CAC. Anything less is a lie. Boards counting on underreported CAC aren’t making capital allocation decisions. They are making blind bets.
Boards should insist that each LTV figure be accompanied by its basis of calculation: sample size, time span, churn variance. Without that, LTV is not governance, it is theater.
Velocity, time value and opportunity cost
Even when CAC is repaid, the timing matters. A customer who buys and pays in a matter of months is low risk. A customer who takes years is effectively accruing interest. Velocity is the rate of interest on GTM debt.
Then there are the silent killers. A dollar repaid three years from now is price far lower than a dollar today. That’s the time value of cash, and most GTM payback charts ignore it.
Put together, they make CAC doubly dangerous. It is not only principal plus interest. It is principal plus hidden decay.
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As such, GTM looks exactly like a lending portfolio. You can load up on volume, but defaults pile up should you aren’t underwriting customers responsibly. Marketing and sales often chase topline numbers. They inflate the dimensions of the loan book without screening for repayment probability.
The portfolio problem
Boards should stop asking, “How much pipeline do now we have?” and begin asking, “How healthy is our CAC portfolio?” Because the reality is, not all notes perform. Some are solid, some are distressed and a few are in default. Treating all of them as equal is financial malpractice.
It also explains why Mmarketing has lost credibility. While the remaining of the C-suite speaks when it comes to risk-adjusted return, marketing speaks in impressions, clicks and brand lift.
If marketing wants its seat back on the table, it must pivot from storytelling to underwriting. It must quantify risk exposure to share erosion, category decline, and profit pool compression. It must stress-test intangible assets like brand equity and status. And, it must present diagnostics that show how GTM reduces enterprise risk.
Accountability and enforcement
This raises the sharpest query: who is accountable when GTM debt is misrepresented, and the way is that accountability enforced beyond simply firing people?
The answer is clear under post-2022 Delaware law. Officers — the CMO, CRO, CFO and CEO — have personal duties of candor and oversight. They are exposed in the event that they misstate CAC or present speculative LTV as fact. Boards are accountable too: in the event that they depend on bad numbers without probing, they’re guilty of oversight failure. And shareholders are the injured party, empowered to bring derivative suits within the company’s name.
This can lead to litigation. SEC and regulatory scrutiny can escalate misrepresentation into securities fraud. Boards can claw back bonuses and equity earned under false reporting. Insurers can strip officers of indemnification. And reputational damage can end an executive’s profession.
For many years, GTM reporting failures were dismissed as incompetence. Delaware 2023 modified that. Misrepresentation is now a governance breach with legal teeth.
Growth is not free — it’s debt
The message for CEOs and CFOs is blunt: GTM is not OpEx, it is not equity-style risk capital, it is debt. Fully loaded CAC is the principal. Velocity is the rate of interest. Churn is default. Time decay and opportunity cost are the premise of recourse.
And the last word query is unavoidable: Are you underwriting GTM debt responsibly, or are you handing out bad loans in your shareholders’ name? In the old world, a bad answer meant wasted spending. In today’s fiduciary environment, it will possibly mean litigation, clawbacks, regulatory scrutiny and reputational smash.
Growth is not free. It is a debt. And the era of pretending otherwise is over.
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