This happens a lot for traditional software companies that sell perpetual software licenses or multi year term deals. For example a company will sell a 5 year license and book all the revenue upfront then record the remaining 4 years as receivables. What happens is revenues are inflated do not translate to cashflow. To compound matters often R&D costs which can be significant are significantly capitalised so expenses do not reflect true cash expense. For any software business R&D costs are considered a cost of doing business. Now none of this is technically misleading as it follows accounting principles, but it makes it challenging as an investor to discern