Sell or dispose
Eventually an asset leaves the books. There are two ways out, and Carbon treats them as genuinely different actions — handled by different teams, with different effects. You sell an asset to a buyer, or you of it when it's done. Both start from an asset that's "Active" or "Fully Depreciated".
The number that anchors both is — what the asset is still worth on the books: its acquisition cost minus the accumulated against it.
Sell it
Selling a piece of equipment is a sales act, so it lives with the sales team. The Sell action drafts a real with a single "Fixed Asset" line pointed at the asset, priced at its net book value. From there it's the ordinary quote-to-cash flow — ship it, invoice it, collect — with the order line carrying a link back to the asset it came from.
Selling an asset hands it to quote-to-cash at book value.
The Sell action doesn't invent a separate sale mechanism — it creates a normal sales order, lined up at net book value, that ships and invoices like any other. The fixed-asset line just remembers which asset was sold.
Dispose it
When an asset is retired rather than sold, you dispose of it — an accounting action. Carbon posts the disposal as a write-off: it clears the accumulated depreciation, removes the asset at its full acquisition cost, and books the remaining net book value as a loss. The asset moves to "Disposed".
Disposing scraps the asset and books its remaining value as a loss.
The disposal entry reverses the asset off the books — debit accumulated depreciation, debit the write-off account for whatever book value remains, credit the asset account for its cost — and records that remaining value as a loss. It's a retirement, not a sale: no proceeds are collected on this path.
They're separate exits, not two names for one thing.
Selling drafts a sales order and leaves the accounting to the invoice; disposing posts the write-off directly and marks the asset "Disposed". One is a sales action at book value, the other an accounting action that retires the asset — choose by whether money is coming in or the asset is simply going away.
That's the asset lifecycle end to end: capitalized onto the books through a register or a purchase receipt, written down month by month through depreciation runs, and finally either sold at book value through quote-to-cash or disposed of as a write-off — the financial half-life of every machine on the floor.