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:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] > 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
[EMAIL PROTECTED] > grep -ril depreciation gnucash/doc/ gnucash/doc/RAW-NOTES gnucash/doc/projects.html
[EMAIL PROTECTED] > 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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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
-- -**-*-*---*-*---*-*---*-----*-*-----*---*-*---*-----*-----*-*-----*--- Jon Lapham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Rio de Janeiro, Brasil Work: Extracta Mol�culas Naturais SA http://www.extracta.com.br/ Web: http://www.jandr.org/ ***-*--*----*-------*------------*--------------------*---------------
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