Actually most companies and ALL analysts use non-GAAP numbers (search for your favorite company + non-gaap https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#...)... it reflects the true nature of the business. They are also referred to as pro-forma numbers. There isn't any funny business going on here. It is good that we have GAAP so you can compare apples to apples in different industries but for a further breakdown non-GAAP numbers are very useful to an analyst.
Yeah but the non-GAAP numbers exclude customer acquisition costs (e.g. marketing). Not sure why that's excluded as marketing is a continuous and fundamental cost of doing business.
No they don't. You misunderstood what acquisition-related costs means. Acquisition related costs are costs related to acquiring another company, not acquiring a customer. It is completely standard practice to treat one-time costs like that differently.
Ok, sorry, I misunderstood. I had lingering memories of the critiques against groupons earlier non-GAAP measures [1][2][3][4][5][6] but the non-GAAP net income mostly seems to exclude stock, acquistion costs are pretty low and very clearly separated from marketing and customer acquisitions. Again, my bad.
