Sales Document Terms

Selling a property is not one accounting event. The price is revenue, but not all of it belongs to this year. The maintenance deposit inside the price is not revenue at all. The brokerage fee the owner pays and the brokerage fee the buyer pays go to two different places. Penalties and discounts accumulate over the life of the contract. And in a great many companies none of it may be recognised until the keys are actually handed over.

The sales term is where all of that is decided. Eight document types share one option set — the sales contract, the initial (preliminary) contract, the opening sales contract, the reservation, the reservation cancellation, the waiver, the handover and the purchase contract — so once you have configured one of them properly, the rest are variations on the same screen.

Read How Real Estate Document Terms Work first: the anatomy of an accounting side, the rule that a pair only fires when both halves are filled, the Confiuration List routing grid and the tax-policy precedence are all explained there and are not repeated here.

What the term books, block by block

The heart of a sales term is page 0, titled Effect (التأثير). It is a long page, and it is long because a sales contract's journal entry is assembled from up to a dozen independent blocks, each of which is only produced when both of its sides are configured.

Account block	Books
Debit / Credit	The contract price
Income Debit / Income Credit	Installments falling due inside the document's fiscal year — recognised revenue
Advance Income Debit / Advance Income Credit	Installments falling due in later years — deferred income
Fees owner debit / Fees owner credit	The brokerage fee (السعي) charged to the owner
Fees buyer debit / Fees buyer credit	The brokerage fee charged to the buyer
Maintenance Deposit Debit / Credit	The maintenance deposit built into the price
Total Penalties - Debit / Credit	The total of the late-payment penalties on the installment lines
Total Discounts - Debit / Credit	The total of the discounts on the installment lines
Header Discount Debit / Credit	The discount applied to the whole price at header level
Pre-Handover debit / Pre-Handover credit	The construction cost already accrued on the estate before it was handed over

Two more amounts on a sales contract are not configured here at all: each line of the Other Fees grid is booked from its own fee type's accounts, and each commission line is booked from its own commission type's accounts. Both catalogues are described in Fee, Commission, Broker and Expense Catalogues.

Underneath the account blocks sit the routing grid (Confiuration List) and the term's own tax policy grid (Legal Entity Taxes), then a group of behavioural switches.

The income / advance income split

The one block worth dwelling on is the income pair versus the advance income pair, because it is the mechanism that keeps a long installment plan out of a single year's profit and loss.

Villa B-12 sells on 1 March for 1,200,000 with 240,000 down and 60 monthly installments of 16,000. When the contract is processed, the system walks the installment grid and asks of every line: is this due inside the document's fiscal year? The ten installments falling before 31 December go to the income pair. The other fifty go to the advance income pair. Next year's opening does not move them — they are released as they are collected and accrued.

An installment whose period straddles the year end can be split pro-rata by day count if the term says so, so that only the part earned this year lands in income.

The behavioural switches

These are the options that change what the document does rather than where the money goes. They sit in a group at the bottom of page 0, with two of them on a second page titled Settings (الإعدادات).

Option	What it does
Create Accounting Effects For Handoverd Documents Only	Suppresses the contract's whole journal entry until the unit has actually been handed over. Nothing is posted at signature; the handover document releases it later. (The shipped English label really does read "Handoverd".)
Validate Remaining And Installments Total Equality	On by default. Blocks the commit when the installment total does not match the remaining value, within the tolerance set in the module configuration. Turn it off only for contracts whose installment plan deliberately does not add up to the price.
Shorten Ledger Effect	Compresses the journal entry: lines sharing the same account and analysis are merged instead of producing one line per installment. On a 60-installment contract this is the difference between a two-line entry and a sixty-line one.
Manual Coding	Off by default, meaning the system numbers the installment lines itself. Turn it on when installment codes must match an external or legacy numbering the user types by hand.
Has Buyer	On by default; makes the Buyer field mandatory. Turned off for company-owned initial contracts where no buyer exists yet.
Pay Installments In Order	Forces collections against this contract to settle installments oldest first. A collection term can override it for a specific collection book — see Collection, Maintenance, Investment and Cost Document Terms.
Calculate Maintenance From Details	Changes where the maintenance deposit total comes from. On: it is summed from the maintenance-cost installment lines, and the percentage field is cleared. Off: it is totalled from the installment-construction rows. A mismatch between the two is what produces "Total maintenance costs … not equal maintenance cost …".
Merge Similar Payment Lines	When the installment plan is generated, lines with the same type and the same due date are collapsed into one. The original amounts survive as the five merged-value components, which the routing grid can post separately.
Prevent Accounting Effects For Other Fees Lines	Skips the Other Fees postings entirely, for companies that invoice those fees separately.
Force Price List	Blocks the commit unless the contract price equals the price the price list produces for that estate.
Consider Paid With Reservation Paid From Installments	Treats the reservation deposit as already collected against the first installment instead of as a separate credit: the generated down-payment line carries the deposit as its paid value and only the balance stays outstanding.

Recognising revenue on delivery — the worked example

This is the most-asked configuration in the module, and it takes two terms, not one.

1. On the sales contract term, tick Create Accounting Effects For Handoverd Documents Only. Villa B-12's contract is now committed on 1 March with no journal entry at all.
2. On the handover term, decide its own Create Accounting Effects. Leave it off if the handover is purely a trigger; turn it on if the handover document should also produce an entry of its own.
3. When the handover document is committed in September, the contract's suppressed entry is generated at that moment. Un-committing the handover reverses it again.

Configuring only step 1 gives you a contract that never posts. Configuring only step 2 gives you a contract that posts at signature and a handover that posts a second time. They belong together.

Where each document differs

All eight terms carry the same underlying option set. What changes is which options the screen shows and what each document adds.

Sales contract

The full screen: page 0 Effect with every account block, the tax grid, the switch group and the routing grid; page 1 Settings with Force Price List and Consider Paid With Reservation Paid From Installments. Everything above applies as written. See The Sales Contract.

Estate handover

One page only, and it adds one option:

Option	What it does
Create Accounting Effects	On: the handover document produces its own journal entry, built from the same blocks as a contract. Off: committing the handover only stamps the contract and the unit as delivered. Switching it off after entries exist deletes the handover's own entry.

See Handing the Unit Over.

Purchase contract

The company is the buyer here, so the same blocks run in the opposite commercial direction. The term adds one option:

Option	What it does
Estate Value Field	Normally the value capitalised onto the purchased estate is the contract price. Naming a field here makes the system read that field on the purchase contract instead — used when the amount to capitalise is price plus fees plus registration costs held somewhere else on the document.

See Estate Values, Additions and Revaluation.

Opening sales contract

Same two pages, Effect and Settings, and the same blocks for the price, the owner and buyer fees, the maintenance deposit, the penalties, the discounts, the recognised income and the header discount — because an opening contract is an ordinary contract that happens to be dated before go-live. One option is specific to it:

Option	What it does
Allow Non Opening Fiscal Period In Opening Sales	Off by default: the document refuses to commit outside an opening fiscal period, failing with "Fiscal period must be openning". Turn it on only when opening balances genuinely have to be entered into a normal period.

See Opening Sales Contracts.

Initial (preliminary) sales contract

The shortest term in the family. It has a single page titled Settings, and it shows no account blocks at all — which matches the document, since a preliminary contract has no accounting effect. It carries Has Buyer, Merge Similar Payment Lines, Force Price List, Consider Paid With Reservation Paid From Installments, the routing grid, and one option of its own:

Option	What it does
Reserve Estate	Forces the document's own Reserve Estate flag on when it is saved, so committing the preliminary contract writes itself into the estate's reservation slot and blocks anybody else from selling or reserving the unit. Un-ticking it, or pointing the contract at a different unit, releases or moves that reservation.

See Reservations and Initial Sales Contracts.

Reservation document

Page 0 Effect here holds a single pair — the reservation deposit — because that is the only money a reservation moves. Page 1 Settings carries Force Price List and Consider Paid With Reservation Paid From Installments, which is the option that later decides whether this deposit is treated as a payment against the first installment of the sales contract.

Reservation cancellation

A single page titled Settings, holding Has Buyer, Merge Similar Payment Lines, Force Price List, Consider Paid With Reservation Paid From Installments and the routing grid. What is retained and what is refunded is booked through the routing grid rather than through named blocks.

Waiver document

Page 0 Effect carries the price, owner fees, buyer fees, maintenance deposit and header discount blocks, plus a dedicated pair for the waiver price — the commission the company charges for transferring the contract to a new buyer. Page 1 is Settings. The option that matters is:

Option	What it does
Reverse Commissions Accounting Effects	Posts every commission line on the waiver with its commission type's debit and credit sides swapped, so the original contract's commission entry is reversed when the buyer waives ownership.

Worked through: a customer who paid 3 of 10 installments on a 1,200,000 villa waives it to a friend, and the company charges 2% — 24,000 — for the transfer. The waiver-price pair books the 24,000; if Reverse Commissions Accounting Effects is on, the 24,000 broker commission booked when the original contract was signed is reversed at the same time. See Waivers and Cancelling a Sale.

Choosing a starting point

If you are configuring the sales family from nothing, do it in this order:

1. The sales contract term first. It is the only one that exercises every block, and the other seven are trimmed versions of it.
2. Decide the recognition moment before you fill any account. Revenue at signature or revenue at handover changes which terms need which options, and it is much harder to change once contracts exist.
3. Fill the income and advance income pairs even if every contract is short. They are what keeps a December contract with January installments out of the wrong year.
4. Leave the routing grid empty until you need it, then add rows for the installment types that genuinely belong elsewhere — the maintenance-cost lines almost always do.
5. Copy the finished term for the initial contract, reservation and waiver rather than starting each from scratch; only the options listed above differ.