Document Terms
Open the Education menu and you find five groups of master files and documents — students and guardians, attendance, buses, meals, school trips — and nowhere among them a Settings screen. There is no place to say "training fees revenue goes to account 4201", or "the receivable should land on the guardian rather than on the trainee". That decision lives where every accounting decision in Nama lives: on the document term (توجيه المستند), the field sitting next to the document's book at the top of the screen.
That matters more in Education than in most modules, because only two documents in the whole module ever reach the ledger — the Course Contract and its Cancel. Everything else in Education records information and books nothing. So the term on those two documents is, in practice, the module's entire accounting configuration.
One screen, two terms
Both documents have a term shape of their own, and the two are built from the same screen, so once you have learned one you have learned both. Each term is typed to its document: a term created for the Course Contract cannot be used on a Course Contract Cancel, and the other way round. A working setup therefore needs at least two terms — the contract term and its mirror — and usually more than that, one pair per branch or per business line.
The screen has three tabs: Effect (التأثير), Other Effects (تأثيرات أخرى) and Discount Effects (تأثير الخصومات).
An accounting side, read once
Nearly everything on those three tabs is an accounting side — one half of a journal entry pair — and the same block of fields repeats over and over. It is worth reading once, here.
| Field | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Side Configuration | Whether this side is used at all, and how it behaves as a ledger side |
| Account Source type | Where the account comes from: a fixed account you name on the term, or a lookup that follows a reference on the document |
| Reference Type / Source Field | When the account follows the document — which reference to read it from, and which field on that reference |
| Subsidiary Account Type | Which kind of subsidiary (ذمة) the resulting ledger line is stamped with |
| Account Code From Bag / Account Field | The account taken out of an account bag, for configurations built on bags |
| Calculate Account Based On Currency From Bag | Picks the bag account matching the line's currency and account type |
| Narration Template / Narration Query, Narration 2 Template / Narration 2 Query | The two description lines written on the ledger line — either a template with placeholders, or a query |
| AnalysisSet Source type, Reference Type / On Field | Where the analysis set on the ledger line comes from — fixed, or read from a reference on the document |
The Effect tab — the pair that carries the deal
The tab holds two groups, Debit (مدين) and Credit (دائن). Between them they book the fees themselves; everything on the other two tabs is a refinement.
Which business meaning goes in which group is decided by the direction of the document, not by your preference. The Course Contract runs outward — it is a sale of training to the person who signs it — so its Debit group is the party side, the receivable that lands on the trainee, the guardian or whoever else pays, and its Credit group is the company side, the fees revenue. The Course Contract Cancel runs the other way, so on its term the two roles swap: the Debit group is the company side and the Credit group is the party side.
The cancellation term is the contract term with its groups exchanged
Set up your contract term first, then build the cancellation term by putting whatever you configured under Debit into Credit and whatever you configured under Credit into Debit. The accounts are the same accounts — only the group they sit in changes. Get that backwards and a cancellation will reinforce the contract's entry instead of reversing it.
The two sides are also valued differently, which catches people out. The party side is booked at what is still owed — the line's net value less anything collected on the document's payment lines. The company side is booked at the line's gross amount, before discounts and taxes, because the discounts and the taxes each get their own pair of sides on the other two tabs and would otherwise be counted twice.
The Credit group also carries Shorten Ledger (إختصار القيود), which merges identical ledger lines so a contract enrolling thirty trainees on the same terms does not produce thirty near-identical pairs of entries.
Two switches on this tab change how the document's own money behaves rather than which account it hits:
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pay Installments In Order | Forces the instalments on the payment schedule to be settled oldest first. Leave it off and any instalment can be settled at any time |
| Allow Payment More Than Invoice Amount | Applies when an outside receipt voucher pays this contract's instalments — with it on, the voucher may pay more than the contract still shows as remaining |
Where the account actually comes from
The whole point of the Account Source on a side is that one term can serve many contracts and still put each receivable on the right party's account. On these two documents there are four references the source can follow, and they are the ones worth building your terms around:
- Student — the trainee named on the detail line. The account is read from that student's own master file, so each line's receivable lands on its own trainee.
- Guardian — not a field on the document, but the guardian of the student on the line. This is how a school bills the parent while still recording the child on the contract line.
- Document Subsidiary — the Subsidiary field in the document header. Since that field accepts a Student, a Guardian or a Customer, this is the source to use when the payer is whoever the contract says it is — including a company paying for its employees' training.
- Line Subsidiary — the Subsidiary column on the detail line, for the case where a single contract splits its lines across different payers.
Students and guardians are accounting subsidiaries in their own right, which is what makes the first three of those work: the master file carries the accounts, and the term just says which reference to follow.
The revenue side normally does not follow anything — you name a fixed account on the term, or take one from an account bag.
The Other Effects tab — cash and the four taxes
This tab gives accounts to the money that is not the deal itself.
- Cash (النقدي) — the side used for money taken at signing. Leave it empty and that amount stays on the main Debit or Credit side instead of getting a line of its own.
- Tax 1, Tax 2, Tax 3, Tax 4 — one group each, and each group carries both the tax side and its other side, the contra account the tax is booked against. These are where the tax amounts typed into the detail lines' tax columns land.
The Discount Effects tab
Every discount level on the detail lines gets a group here, and so does the header discount, each with its side and its other side. Configure only the levels your contracts actually use — a group with no side configured simply produces no entry, and the discount stays folded into the amounts.
A worked example — tuition receivable against fees revenue
A training centre in Riyadh bills trainees directly and posts all training income to one revenue account.
Term "Training Contract – Riyadh", created for the Course Contract:
| Group | Setting |
|---|---|
| Debit | Account Source = Document Subsidiary, with the subsidiary account type for trainee receivables — so the debit lands on the account carried by whichever student, guardian or customer is in the header |
| Credit | Account Source = a fixed account, 4201 Training Fees Revenue |
A contract enrolling two trainees at 12,000 each is committed. The entry is 24,000 debit on the payer's receivable account — stamped with that payer as the subsidiary — against 24,000 credit on 4201. If 4,000 of it was taken by card at signing on the contract's payment lines, that 4,000 books to the account named on the payment method itself and the payer's side carries the remaining 20,000.
Term "Training Contract Cancel – Riyadh", created for the Course Contract Cancel, is the same configuration with the groups exchanged:
| Group | Setting |
|---|---|
| Debit | Account Source = a fixed account, 4201 Training Fees Revenue |
| Credit | Account Source = Document Subsidiary, same subsidiary account type as above |
Cancelling 15,000 of that contract then books 15,000 debit on 4201 against 15,000 credit on the payer — the exact mirror of the part being undone.
Change a term, and old documents keep their old entry
A term is read when the document is processed. Editing a term does not go back and rewrite entries that already exist. If you correct a term that had the wrong account, the documents committed under the old configuration have to be reprocessed — the Regenerate Accounting Effects toolbar action re-issues the ledger entry for the documents you select using the term as it stands now.
Books, and how a term gets picked
Every Education document carries two records at the top of its screen and they are easy to confuse. The book decides the document's numbering series and a few small behaviours; the term decides how the document behaves and what it books. A term can restrict which books it will work with, through its Allowed Books grid or an allowed-books rule, and that is how each book ends up paired with the term that belongs to it — a Riyadh book with the Riyadh term, a corporate-training book with the corporate term. The details are on the Document Books page, and the term fields that are common to every module across Nama are described in Document Terms.