Depreciation and Capital Gains

[Jon Lapham]

The GnuCash documentation group (cough, cough) is proud to present the 
latest, greatest, newest, most excitingest version of the documentation 
on depreciation and capital gains!  Man, it doesn't get any better than 
proof reading documentation on accounting!  So, join the fun and tell 
Jon what an idiot he is for doing ___________ .  (you fill in the 
underlined area).

http://www.jandr.org/temp/gnucashdocs/chapter8.html

(be sure and force your browsers to reload, you don't want to see any 
cached images or web pages)

While I think that the depreciation section is coming along nicely 
(done?), the capital gains section is still in need of work. 
Specifically, I am not happy with the account names in the Account Setup 
section.  I've changed them a bit from the v1.6 documentation, what do 
you think?  Good?  Bad?  Ugly?

Also, the example section is still a mess.  Any suggestions would be 
appreciated.  Specifically, can anyone explain to me what the idea is in 
the v1.6 documentation section "Selling the Asset" under the 
"optimistic" subsection, where it is said: 'If any amounts had been 
accrued as Accrued Gains, the asset amount should be closed out, offset 
by a negative value for Accrued Gain  income. If the total that had been 
accrued was $5000, then the transaction might look like the following'

Original v1.6 docs on cap gains:
http://www.gnucash.org/docs/C/gnucash-docs-1.6/xacc-capitalgains.html

=============================================
Chapter 8 Changes:

-Renamed the chapter from "assets and loans" to "depreciation and 
capital gains" (Chris, I'm thinking it is better to split the chapter, I 
cannot figure out a way to logically include loans here.  Is that okay?)

-Moved loans out (it will go into a new chapter, if there are no objections)

-Added a year "0" to the depreciation schedule tables.

-Much text rewrite (ie: changed some tech-talk to human-speak)

-Depreciation account setup and the example now shows *2* depreciating 
assets rather than 1.  (Did I do this correctly?  Is there still just a 
single depreciation expense account for 2 depreciating assets?).  I 
think this is better in that it is a more general way of showing an example.

-I'm using the account layout as suggested by Perry Smith (using 
subaccounts Cost and Depreciation under an account named for the asset). 
  *I* like this layout, it makes logical sense to me.  What do y'all think?

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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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