2.4.1 depreciation basics

[David Carlson]

On 5/26/2014 11:49 AM, John Ralls wrote:
> On May 26, 2014, at 9:22 AM, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I am just another user and I have not seen that particular manual. 
>> However, I will hazard a guess that actually the depreciation
>> transactions are not related at all to the purchase transactions, with
>> the possible exception that they may all have split lines in the asset
>> account  for your truck, depending on what account you used to
>> accumulate the depreciation.
>>
>> Further, the check for the taxes probably did not contain a split line
>> in the asset account for the truck, since it was just a tax payment. 
>> Thus you probably did everything right except for being in the register
>> for the truck asset account, where you should not see the tax payment. 
>> That would be in the checking account register.
>>
>> It would behoove you to take care whether the amounts are correctly
>> placed in the right hand or left hand column, "Deposit" or "Withdrawal",
>> "Increase" or "Decrease" or otherwise named in the registers for
>> different account types.
>>
> The depreciation transactions *must* have a split in the Asset account holding the truck or a “depreciation” sub-account of it. That’s what depreciation means: Reducing the carried value of a tangible asset.
>
> Since he’s capitalizing the tax payment, it also becomes part of the carried value of the asset and goes to the Asset account holding the truck (which is a good reason to create a separate account for the truck’s asset value, to keep the two transactions together) rather than to Expenses:Tax.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
>
>
John, you are right.  In my answer I was simply suggesting an alternate
theory on how a transaction might seem to disappear without actually
going missing from the data file.

David C