Terms for Custody and Letters of Credit
Two chains in this module keep their own accounting, and both are configured differently enough from the main asset documents to deserve their own page.
Custody is a separate register — laptops, phones, tools issued to staff — that is never depreciated, so its terms are not about cost and depreciation at all. They are about moving a value from one holder to another. Letters of credit are the opposite problem: several documents collect costs over months and one closing document turns the accumulated total into an asset cost.
Custody Terms
Custody documents have no asset accounts to fall back on, so — unlike the fixed asset documents — the term supplies both sides of every entry. The four custody terms are all account wiring and nothing else.
The custody purchase term
Buying a custody item is an invoice, and its term reads like one. It has three pages: the term's own identity and tax settings, then the invoice effect, then the other effects.
The invoice effect page carries the two sides of the purchase — the group مدين / Debit and the group دائن / Credit — plus the shorten-ledger option and the payment-order rule. The other effects page carries the tax 1 group and the cash group.
When Al-Waha buys the CDY-0033 laptop for 6,000:
| Debit | Credit | |
|---|---|---|
| Custody value — the term's debit side | 6,000 | |
| Supplier — the term's credit side | 6,000 |
Note what has not happened: the 6,000 did not become an expense. It is sitting in whatever account you named on the debit side, waiting to be assigned to a person. That is the whole point of the custody register, and the delivery term below is what moves it.
The custody delivery term
The delivery document is where a purchased item becomes somebody's responsibility. Its term is a single page holding one debit account side and one credit account side, and there is nothing else on it.
The setup that makes custody reporting work is this: make the debit an account resolved from the employee, so that each person's holdings land in their own subsidiary account, and make the credit the account the purchase parked the value in — "custodies in store", or whatever you called it. Handing the laptop to Khaled Al-Mutairi then moves 6,000 out of store and onto Khaled.
The amount posted is the custody's price multiplied by the percentage of it that holder takes, so a car shared 60/40 between two staff produces two lines that add up to its price.
The custody transfer term
A transfer moves an item from one holder to another, which is two movements in one document: value comes off the people who had it, and goes onto the people who now have it. The term therefore carries two pairs of account sides — one pair for the holders the item is leaving, one for the holders it is joining.
In the ordinary case both pairs point at the same two accounts as the delivery term, and the effect is a reversal off the old holder and a charge onto the new one. Keeping them separately configurable is what lets you route, say, a transfer to a different branch through a mediating account.
The custody disposal term
Disposal ends the custody's life — scrapped, sold, lost, written off. Its term carries two pairs of account sides as well: one pair that clears the value the custody was carrying, and one pair for the disposal value itself.
There is no gain or loss account here
Unlike the fixed asset disposal, the custody disposal term has no profit and no loss account. If a laptop carried at 6,000 is sold for 1,500, the difference is not computed into a separate line — the accounts you nominate on the two pairs have to absorb it. Choose them with that in mind: most sites point the disposal pair at a write-off account precisely so the difference has somewhere sensible to land.
Letter of Credit Terms
The letter-of-credit chain has four documents, and only two of them have anything to configure.
The letter of credit and the proforma invoice
The letter of credit itself (اعتماد أصول) has no term at all — it is the folder that the other three documents hang off, not a financial document.
The proforma invoice (فاتوره اعتماد مبدئية) books nothing and does not require a term. This is the document that lists the goods — Press A at 300,000 and Press B at 200,000 for Al-Waha's LC-2026-004 — and those figures are a distribution base, not a cost. They tell the system how to share out the expenses; they never capitalise by themselves. Nothing about that needs a term.
The expense document term
Every cost that lands on the shipment is entered on expense documents: the supplier's goods value, freight, customs duty, clearance, insurance, bank charges. Its term is a single page, and it is the page where you set the two sides of the expense entry — the account the cost is collected into while it waits for the closing document, and the account of whoever is owed the money.
That second side is more interesting than it looks. Because it is a full account side, it can resolve per document rather than being a fixed account: point it at the letter of credit's insurance party or customs party and each expense document credits the right company automatically, instead of forcing one clearing account to stand in for everyone.
The same page carries:
- four tax pairs, a debit and a credit account each;
- a discount pair;
- Do Not Affect On Cost (
عدم التأثير في التكاليف) — the switch that marks a line as booked but excluded from the landed cost, for charges you want in the ledger but not in the machine's value; - Taxable, Editable Taxes and Tax Plan.
For LC-2026-004 the expense documents collect 615,000: goods 500,000, freight 40,000, customs duty 60,000 and clearance 15,000.
The cost document term — the one that takes the asset's own account
The closing document sums each asset's share of everything the expense documents collected, writes it onto the asset as its cost, and puts the machines into service. Its entry reverses what the expense documents built up.
Here is the fact that surprises people, and the reason this term screen looks almost empty: the cost document debits each asset's own main account, taken from the asset — not from the term. However you configure this term, the asset side comes from the machine's accounts bag, normally inherited from its asset type. So the term has exactly one thing to set: the clearing account on the credit side, the account the expense documents debited and that this document now empties.
For LC-2026-004, with the 615,000 distributed by value — 60% to Press A and 40% to Press B:
| Debit | Credit | |
|---|---|---|
PRS-0001 Press A cost account — from the asset | 369,000 | |
PRS-0002 Press B cost account — from the asset | 246,000 | |
| Letter-of-credit clearing — the term's credit side | 615,000 |
The practical consequence is that getting an imported machine into the right cost account is an asset type question, not a term question. If Press A is landing in the wrong account, look at FAT-MCH — Machinery & Equipment and at the press's own accounts bag; changing the cost document's term will not move it.
See the cost document for what else that document does to the assets — the depreciation parameters, the status change, and the closing of the credit.