Hi Folks - So, I've developed a couple of apps to help out ledger with depreciation. Depreciation, for those that don't know, is the method of recognizing an expense inline with when the asset is used. For instance if you buy a building, you wouldn't expense it when you buy it, you'd expense it over the life of the building (like say 50 years). A computer would have a much shorter depreciation schedule, but it would use one of the accelerated methods (ddb or sum of the years digits).
Anyhow, ledger by itself can't really deal with this, you would have to make a depreciation schedule by hand then make every entry as they come up over time (which might encourage you to not do it on smallish assets -- which is against GAAP -- or do it once a year, which would screw up monthly income). I've automated this process with a couple of tools: https://github.com/tazzben/DepreciateForLedger/wiki https://github.com/tazzben/LedgerScheduler/wiki Depreciate for Ledger, creates every entry of the depreciation schedule. You can specify the depreciation method (it currently supports straight-line, double declining balance, sum of the years digits and a hybrid of straight-line and DDB), cost, residual, etc. and save it to a file. This looks like any other ledger file except the dates are all in the future. Ledger Scheduler takes the file (which can contain any future ledger entries) and pushes the appropriate transactions into a target file on the appropriate date. You can set this to run with cron. Technically, you could set any schedule you want, but given the nature of depreciation, once a month is sufficient for most people, and once a day would be sufficient for anyone.
