assets and loans guide

[Jon Lapham]

Christopher Browne wrote:
> Quite a lot of work has gone into the documentation, over the years, and
> it's more than a little irritating if the "problems of lack of good
> documentation" are merely the result of ignoring what was already there.

Hmmm... I couldn't agree more.  Which is why I asked.

> Presumably it should be somewhere in CVS, unless people have taken to
> the habit of flushing perfectly good documentation down the toilet in
> favor of a succession of people rewriting it over and over again from
> scratch.

Sure, I understand your point on this... which is why I asked the 
question.  I do not want to *redo* any work if possible.

This is the results of some searching the current gnucash-docs and 
current 1.8 branch packages:

lapham at bilbo > grep -ril depreciation gnucash-docs/
gnucash-docs/guide/C/chapter8.xml
gnucash-docs/guide/C/toc.xml
gnucash-docs/guide/C/toc_040401.txt
gnucash-docs/help/C/txf-categories.xml
gnucash-docs/help/C/gnucash-help/custom-gnucash.html
gnucash-docs/help/de_DE/txf-categories.xml
gnucash-docs/help/de_DE/gnucash-help/custom-gnucash.html

lapham at bilbo > grep -ril depreciation gnucash/doc/
gnucash/doc/RAW-NOTES
gnucash/doc/projects.html

lapham at bilbo > grep -ril depreciation gnucash/src/doc/
gnucash/src/doc/books.txt
gnucash/src/doc/finutil.html
gnucash/src/doc/lots.txt


Taking these in turn:

./guide/C/chapter8.xml
-only contains section headings, no real text

./guide/C/toc.xml and ./guide/C/toc_040401.txt
-table of contents only, no real text

gnucash-docs/help/C/txf-categories.xml
-tax stuff talking about schedule F6252

gnucash-docs/help/C/gnucash-help/custom-gnucash.html
-more tax stuff

(the de_DE files are translations)

gnucash/doc/RAW-NOTES contains:

John Hasler <john at dhh.gt.org>  said:
 > Lauren writes:
 > > I'm not familliar with sinking funds, but what makes them a bit 
different
 > > from a book entry like depreciation (also somewhat virtual) is that 
they
 > > are happening with real accounts that need to be reconciled against an
 > > outside statement.
 >
 > I don't see that.  While the purpose of a sinking fund may be to pay off
 > some bonds in ten years and there may even exist a legal obligation 
to have
 > it, the funds being transferred to it now have nothing to do with any
 > outside statement.
 >
 > A sinking fund to pay off some bonds is pretty much the same thing as
 > saving up to pay off the balloon payment on the morgage.
 >
 > When you transfer funds to your "Savings Goal" or your "Sinking Fund" you
 > are transferring funds from one asset account to another.  Just credit
 > 'Cash' and debit 'Savings Goals:Honeymoon'.

The problem with proceeding to credit Cash and debit "Savings Goal" is
that this invalidates any reconciliation of Cash.  I'd be game to do
this if I credited not Cash, but rather "Cash:Goals", a subaccount of
Cash that can be ignored when it needs to be,

For different purposes, I will want both to consider and ignore these
"funds reservations."

a) When making up a _budget_, I care about what funds are reserved for
    particular purposes.

b) When trying to figure out if my bank account is going to be
overdrawn,
    "reserved" funds are _irrelevant._

I would thus suggest that the "gentle user" use the budget system to
manage this rather than having these be "true" transactions in the
ledger.

gnucash/doc/projects.html contains:

Asset Depreciation, Sinking Funds, Amortization Schedules
     Need to support different depreciation schedules (see IRS books for 
that). Asset depreciation is complex; there are many different 
depreciation schedules, and these vary from country to country, and 
change when new tax laws are implemented. It might be hard for free 
software to provide a no-cost subscription to updated depreciation modules.

gnucash/src/doc/books.txt contains:

Note that the correct handling of depreciation, capital gains and
other similar accounting concepts requires that 'lots' be supported
by the engine, and in turn, handled correctly by the 'books'
infrastructure.  Currently, 'lots' are incompletely supported by
the engine, and this causes the book implementation to be broken in
a certain fundamental sense.  See 'lots.txt' for details.

gnucash/src/doc/lots.txt contains:

'Lots' capture a fundamental accounting idea behind AR/AP, billing,
inventory, capital gains, depreciation and the like.  The basic idea
is that a set of items is tracked together as a 'lot'; the date of
creation of the lot helps determine when a bill is due, when depreciation
starts, or the tax rate for capital gains on a stock market investment.

gnucash/src/doc/finutil.html contains:

-has a small section entitled "Appreciation" with a list of words under it:

Appreciation
Depreciation
Compound Growth
Savings Account

============================================

So, Chris, I'm guessing that your documentation is not any of this?  Help!

Thanks,
-Jon

-- 
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  Jon Lapham  <lapham at extracta.com.br>          Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
  Work: Extracta Moléculas Naturais SA     http://www.extracta.com.br/
  Web: http://www.jandr.org/
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