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Guys, all of this amazing text based accounting software are very interesting to me. Does anyone knows if is there any feature for automatic registering of depr

Guys, all of this amazing text based accounting software are very interesting to me. Does anyone knows if is there any feature for automatic registering of depreciation? If not, how to do not forget to register and how to keep track of all assets that will depreciate? Separated file?

husky00 3y ago
A cursory Google search lead me to this[1], which seems to be what you're looking for, something similar probably exists for ledger/hledger. Personally having dealt with crypto in beancount a few times I used a separate file which got updated periodically with a script, which worked well enough. If you're interested I suggest reading the beancount cookbook[2] as it contain many examples. [1] https://github.com/davidastephens/beancount-plugins#automatic-depreciation https://github.com/davidastephens/beancount-plugins#automati... [2] https://beancount.github.io/docs/command_line_accounting_cookbook.html https://beancount.github.io/docs/command_line_accounting_coo...
kqr 3y ago
The dumb answer is that it should be fairly uncomplicated to write a script that idempotently adds depreciation for depreciable assets. I suspect that's the general strength and weakness of plain text accounting. There's not as much pre-built tooling, but it's not that hard to build on your own.
Naga 3y ago
You'd need to write a script yourself for this. The general ledger generally doesn't include enough information about all of your assets, expected end of useful life, serials, etc. It's pretty common for accounting software packages to track this stuff and calculate depreciation, but like you're guessing its a separate process. I was an accountant in a former life, and this is a question that most companies end up solving with their accounting software. Last time I looked into ledger or hledger it didn't include this stuff (or I didn't notice that it did).
- simonmic 3y ago
  After a quick search of docs, I think that's still the case. hledger-interest is possibly a useful component.

husky00 3y ago

A cursory Google search lead me to this[1], which seems to be what you're looking for, something similar probably exists for ledger/hledger. Personally having dealt with crypto in beancount a few times I used a separate file which got updated periodically with a script, which worked well enough. If you're interested I suggest reading the beancount cookbook[2] as it contain many examples. [1] https://github.com/davidastephens/beancount-plugins#automatic-depreciation https://github.com/davidastephens/beancount-plugins#automati... [2] https://beancount.github.io/docs/command_line_accounting_cookbook.html https://beancount.github.io/docs/command_line_accounting_coo...

kqr 3y ago

The dumb answer is that it should be fairly uncomplicated to write a script that idempotently adds depreciation for depreciable assets. I suspect that's the general strength and weakness of plain text accounting. There's not as much pre-built tooling, but it's not that hard to build on your own.

Naga 3y ago

You'd need to write a script yourself for this. The general ledger generally doesn't include enough information about all of your assets, expected end of useful life, serials, etc. It's pretty common for accounting software packages to track this stuff and calculate depreciation, but like you're guessing its a separate process. I was an accountant in a former life, and this is a question that most companies end up solving with their accounting software. Last time I looked into ledger or hledger it didn't include this stuff (or I didn't notice that it did).

simonmic 3y ago
After a quick search of docs, I think that's still the case. hledger-interest is possibly a useful component.