Automated Depreciation Entries

[happ...@gmail.com]

As part of exploring the space of things beancount can do, last night I wrote a plugin to automatically add entries at the end of the year for depreciation of assets.

https://bitbucket.org/snippets/happyalu/EAMgj/beancount-automated-depreciation-plugin

It was a lot of fun doing this and learning the beancount internals! However, I'm sure there are lots of places to improve the code, so a beancount-expert perspective on this would be very valuable! Please also let me know if there already is built-in code to handle depreciation that I could use instead.

Alok

[Martin Blais]

Hi Alok,

Thanks for your plugin!

I've added a link to to it from the contributions web page.

I'll have a look later this weekend when there is time and answer your other email as well (busy times).

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[Dave Stephens]

Thanks for sharing that - coincidentally, I was just adding depreciation to my corporate beancount, so this helps a lot.  

I have to add some options for Canadian taxes.  Where should I contribute them?  Are you going to add this as a plugin in the main repository Martin?

[Martin Blais]

I think for now I won't integrate contributions just yet. I will eventually write up a contributor's agreement and perhaps integrate these submissions in, but also only if people want me to, and much later.

I have a fair bit of other priorities to deal with over the next few months:

- Finish the new inventory booking method (ongoing, see 'booking' branch if interested)

- Fold ledgerhub into Beancount

- Complete some work on export & price fetching

- Write the main intro doc

Everything else comes after (unless I'm procrastinating).

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/a50952bf-c4da-4690-98f0-b06eed2ea64d%40googlegroups.com.

[Dave Stephens]

Thanks for sharing that plugin Alok, exactly what I needed (subject to a few changes).

Since I couldn't add contributions to that snippet, I made a new version of it here:

https://github.com/davidastephens/beancount-plugins/blob/master/beancount_plugins/plugins/flexible_depreciation/depreciate.py

It adds a couple features:

- option to add a subaccount to the depreciation expense.

   ie: instead of Expenses:Depreciation, option to break out the depreciation between different categories (Expenses:Depreciation:Printer, Expenses:Depreciation:Computer, etc).

- option to add subaccount to the asset.

   ie: instead of the depreciation being applied directly to Assets:Printer, it is applied to Assets:Printer:Depreciation, so you can see the book value of the asset and accumulated depreciation.

- "CRA" depreciation method.   Calculation used by the Canada Revenue Agency - applies 50% depreciation if the asset was purchased during the fiscal year.

- Ability to adjust individual years by arbitrary multiplier.

    My business had a shortened fiscal year in its first year of business.  I used this to reduce depreciation to 340/365 days.