Services or Machines?

If you have already read the maintenance pages and then opened the Service Documents folder, you will have felt an odd sense of déjà vu. The screens look the same. The tabs carry the same names. The buttons say almost the same words. And then, in the middle of a document about servicing a bank branch, there is a grid headed Machines.

That is not a fault in your installation, and it is not a second copy of the same menu. It is a second product, and this page exists to tell you which of the two you should buy and use.

Required licence

Everything on this page and in the rest of this folder needs the licence code crm-maintenance-services. The machine maintenance folder needs a different code, crm-maintenance. They are sold separately.

Two Products, One Code Base

Maintenance Documents (licence crm-maintenance, menu folder مستندات الصيانة) and Service Documents (licence crm-maintenance-services, menu folder سندات خدمات الصيانة) are two separately licensed products that share one code base. Every screen exists twice: once with a Machine (آلة) as its subject, and once with a Maintenance Service (خدمة صيانة) as its subject.

That single swap — machine in, service out — is the whole conceptual difference. A maintenance order is about a compressor with a serial number; a service order is about "AC servicing, Smouha Branch". Everything around that subject — the contract, the work plan, the order, the execution sheet, the spare parts, the technicians, the status trail — was copied from the machine suite and given a service instead of a machine.

Neither branch is deprecated and neither replaces the other. The machine suite is much older, much more widely deployed and still growing. The services branch was added later, for businesses whose work is delivered to a place rather than to a piece of equipment: facility soft services, cleaning and security cover, branch servicing, site landscaping.

Never assume symmetry

The two folders are not mirror images. The services branch is a reduced feature set, and several of the things a reader would expect to find simply do not exist there. The exclusion list below is not a footnote — it is the reason this page is the first thing you should read.

What the Services Branch Does Not Have

There is no service counterpart at all for any of these:

Missing in the services branch	What that means in practice
Maintenance Estimation	There is no costing sheet document in this branch.
Maintenance Visit	Visits are never recorded as their own document. The execution sheet is the only record that a visit happened.
Pre-Installation Preview	No site-survey document.
CRM Maintenance Plan	No daily plan document.
Maintenance Itinerary	No route or dispatch itinerary, so the daily-dispatch feature of the machine suite has no equivalent here.
Machine Ownership Transfer	A serviced site cannot be transferred from one customer to another by document. Change the customer on the record by hand.
Machine Update	There is no bulk field-update document for service records.

Three more gaps are inside the documents that do exist:

• The Maintenance Service Order Execution has no document term at all. Its machine twin has one. The Term field is on the screen, but there are no options behind it — the same is true of the Maintenance Service Notice, Sales Order and Sales Quotation.
• There are no instalments, no payment schedule, no external payments, no reward points and no discount coupons anywhere in this branch. The machine suite has all of them.
• There is no mobile check-in and check-out flow. The Nama Mobile technician attendance feature belongs to the machine suite's notice document only.

The Question That Decides It: Can You Charge for Labour?

Here is the fact that decides the choice for most businesses, and it is easier to say than to accept.

Services in this branch carry no price

A service line in the Service Documents folder has no item, no quantity and no price. There is nowhere to type a rate for the work. The Total Price Of Services (إجمالي سعر الخدمات) group and the matching grid column are therefore always 0.00 on every screen in this branch — contract, order, execution, invoice, return, sales order, sales quotation.

A Maintenance Service Invoice can bill spare parts only. Service revenue never reaches the ledger.

So the choice comes down to this:

• If your product is labour — a cleaning contract, a security contract, a monthly servicing retainer — and you expect the system to price it, total it and invoice it, then the Service Documents branch cannot do that as it stands. The machine maintenance branch can: it has a priced service catalogue whose lines carry an item, a quantity and a price, and those lines reach the invoice and the ledger. Register each serviced site as a machine record and use the machine suite.
• If you already run the machine suite and your only reason to look at Service Documents is that some of your subjects are sites rather than equipment, stay where you are. A machine record is generic enough to stand for a site, and you keep pricing, instalments, visits, itineraries and the ownership history.
• Use the Service Documents branch when what you need is a dispatch-and-execute engine: plan recurring visits from a contract, generate work plans and orders, send an employee, record the checklist and the parts consumed, and invoice the parts. The one supported way to charge for the labour itself is to register the service fee as a stock or service item and put it in the Spare Parts grid. That is not a workaround somebody invented — it is the only route the product supports.

There is a second, quieter consequence of the missing price. The contract's spare-part entitlement columns — Sold Quantity (ما تم بيعه) and Remaining Quantity (المتبقي) — look like allowances that get drawn down as work is done. They are not. Nothing in this branch ever consumes them. They are manual bookkeeping columns, and no over-draw is ever refused. See Service Invoicing for the full picture.

A Naming Clash You Will Trip Over

Two different files are called something very close to "Maintenance Service", and they belong to different products:

File	Licence	What it is
Maintenance Service (خدمة صيانة)	crm-maintenance-services	The thing being serviced — a site, branch, floor or area with a customer, a location and a task checklist. This branch's equivalent of the Machine. It is not a list of services you can sell.
Machine Maintenance Service (خدمة صيانة ماكينة)	crm-maintenance	The priced service catalogue of the machine suite — a named service with a price and a tax plan that you put on an order line and charge for.

The services branch has no equivalent of the second one, which is exactly why services here carry no price. If your implementer can, ask for the first file to be relabelled to something like Serviced Location — it removes most of the confusion in one edit. Service Records covers that file in detail; the priced catalogue is described in The Service Catalogue.

Machine Vocabulary You Will See Anyway

Because the shared foundation was written for machines first, machine wording survives on service screens. None of it is a defect you can fix from the screen, and knowing it in advance saves a support call:

• Header fields labelled Machine Type (نوع الآلة) and Machine Category (تصنيف آلة) appear on service contracts, orders and notices. Machine Category is genuinely used — it filters the task-template lookup — so fill it. Machine Type is inherited and inert here.
• Machine Classification 1..5 and Serial Number are on the screens too, as free reference fields.
• On the Maintenance Service Order the services grid is titled "Machines" (ألآت) although every row in it is a service. The other five documents in the folder title the same grid correctly.
• The Maintenance Visits tab (on the order, invoice and invoice return) and the Visits Number tab (on the contract, sales order and sales quotation) both list the machine suite's visit document. They can never show a row in this branch. Do not use them as evidence that no visits took place.

What Is in the Folder

The whole branch is ten records and documents, under Customer Relationship Management → Service Documents (خدمة العملاء ← سندات خدمات الصيانة):

Screen	Arabic	Kind
Maintenance Service	خدمة صيانة	Master file — the serviced site
Maintenance Service Sales Quotation	عرض أسعار خدمة صيانة	Document
Maintenance Service Sales Order	أمر بيع خدمة صيانة	Document
Maintenance Service Contract	عقد خدمة صيانة	Document
Maintenance Service Work Plan	خطة عمل خدمة صيانة	Document
Maintenance Service Notice	بلاغ خدمة صيانة	Document
Maintenance Service Order	أمر خدمة صيانة	Document
Maintenance Service Order Execution	تنفيذ أمر خدمة صيانة	Document
Maintenance Service Invoice	فاتورة خدمة صيانة	Document
Maintenance Service Invoice Return	مردود فاتورة خدمة الصيانة	Document

The Licence Alone Is Not Enough

The crm-maintenance-services licence covers those ten screens and nothing else. But those screens ask for a lot of reference data that is licensed under crm-maintenance: buildings, floors and rooms, machine categories, the five classification files, maintenance groups, dysfunctions, trouble levels and trouble descriptions, order statuses and task templates.

Buy both codes

A site licensed for crm-maintenance-services alone will find reference fields on every screen whose master file it cannot create. In practice, running the services branch means licensing crm-maintenance as well. Raise this before the contract is signed, not during the setup.

Reporting, and What Runs on Its Own

Two module-wide facts apply here exactly as they do everywhere else in CRM:

• There are no system reports and no dashboards for CRM at all. One print form — the CRM Visit form — is the entire shipped reporting story, and it belongs to a different part of the module. For anything in this folder, use list views, Excel export, or a BI dashboard built by your site.
• There is no scheduler anywhere in this module. No task schedule, no reminder, no alarm, no escalation, no notification. Work plans, orders and executions look scheduled, but every one of them is produced by somebody pressing a button.

The Example Used Throughout This Folder

The other three pages follow one thread, so the numbers stay consistent:

Nile Commercial Bank (C-02240) contracts Al Nokhba to service the split air-conditioning units in three Alexandria branches. Each branch is one Maintenance Service record: SRV-0071 Smouha, SRV-0072 Sidi Gaber, SRV-0073 Manshia. One service contract, SVC-0006, runs from 1 May to 1 November 2026 and covers 39 planned visits and 312 filters. Work plan SWP-0011 produces service order SO-0058, which is executed as SEX-0090 and invoiced as SINV-0033.

Read on: Service Records for the serviced-site file, Service Orders and Executions for the working chain, and Service Invoicing for the money.