Overview
Staff loans are small money and large administration. The advance itself takes a minute; what costs the company is the eighteen months afterwards — remembering to deduct the instalment, knowing what is still outstanding when someone resigns, answering an employee who is certain they have already repaid more than the file says.
Nama makes the loan a document with a schedule attached, and lets the payroll run do the remembering.
The loan type does the deciding
A loan type is where the policy lives: the default amount and the default number of instalments, whether recovery runs weekly or monthly, how instalments round, and whether the first or last instalment is different from the rest. When HR picks a type on a request, those defaults fill themselves in — and entering an amount recalculates the instalment count, or the other way round.
That is what makes a lending policy consistent. The rules belong to the type, not to whoever is at the desk today.
Request, document, schedule
A loan request carries the employee, the type, the amount and the start date, and waits for a decision. Once it is accepted, the loan document is created from it — and the picker offers only accepted requests, so an advance cannot be disbursed against an application nobody approved.
On the document, generating instalments builds the actual schedule: one dated, valued line per instalment, according to the type’s period, rounding and any first-or-last override. That schedule is what the employee is disbursed against, and what payroll then deducts month by month without anyone re-entering it. A manual repayment — cash handed back, or a deduction from something other than salary — is recorded as its own payment document against the same schedule.
When the plan changes, and it does
Three things change a running loan without disturbing the original disbursement, and each leaves a document behind.
- Relief forgives all or part of what is outstanding — a hardship write-off, or a final settlement where the remainder is cleared rather than collected. It works line by line against the instalments, exactly like a payment, except the amount is forgiven.
- Rescheduling moves instalments around in time when circumstances change.
- Disabling pauses recovery altogether and resumes it later, for an unpaid leave or a suspension.
Because all three point back at the loan they adjust, the outstanding balance is always a figure the system derives rather than one somebody maintains. When an employee leaves, that balance is one of the lines the final settlement nets off against what they are owed — which is the moment the whole arrangement either works or turns into an argument.
Loan types, the request-to-schedule flow, payments, relief, rescheduling and disabling are documented in the loans and instalments section.
