Overview
Every sales system can raise an invoice. The difference shows up earlier and later: whether the person quoting knew what was in stock and what this customer already owes, and whether the invoice, once saved, still needs three other things done to it by somebody else.
In Nama the sale is one chain of documents, each generated from the one before it, and the invoice is the point where stock, revenue, tax, cost of sales and the customer’s balance all move at once.
The path, and how much of it you use
Enquiry → quotation → order → reservation → picking → delivery → invoice → collection. A cash sale skips most of it. A tender-priced project sale uses all of it. The point of having the whole chain defined is that each document is generated from its predecessor, so nothing is re-keyed and the audit trail exists without anyone maintaining one.
Before a quotation goes out, the system puts the useful things in front of the person writing it: what is available now, the lead time on what is not, the cost — so the price is a margin decision rather than a guess — and the customer’s own history of purchases, payment behaviour and agreed terms. Quotes carry a validity period and a tracked outcome: converted, revised, expired or lost. Where the buyer needs a document for a budget approval, customs or an advance payment, a proforma invoice looks like an invoice and behaves like a quote.
The order adds the commitments: requested delivery date, a delivery address that may not be the billing address, which warehouse will fulfil, and the credit-limit check for a customer buying on account.
The price is a stack, not a number
This is where most sales pages are vague and most sales arguments start. In Nama the price a customer pays is the result of layers you can inspect:
- Price lists per customer segment, period and currency, each with an effective date range and a priority so overlapping lists resolve predictably instead of arbitrarily.
- Quantity tiers — one price for one to ten, a lower one for eleven to fifty, a lower one above that.
- Automatic pricing from cost plus a margin, with a default, a minimum and a maximum, recalculating when cost moves rather than drifting away from it.
- Offers — a percentage, an amount, free items or a value-based incentive, targeted by customer, sector or invoice classification and tied to a season so a promotion starts and ends on its own.
- Coupons, and for loyalty programmes, prices expressed in points.
What saving the invoice actually does
An invoice is simultaneously a claim on the customer and a movement of goods. Saving it — not as a draft — issues the sold items, so quantities fall, locations empty, the serials and batches that left are recorded and the cost of goods sold is captured. It posts the entry: receivable or cash, revenue, tax collected, cost of sales against inventory. It raises the customer’s balance, updates their credit-limit usage and creates the due date that ageing will track.
Where an e-invoicing regime applies, the invoice is built in the authority’s format, transmitted, and comes back with its identifier and QR code — Saudi ZATCA, the Egyptian ETA, Jordan and the UAE each on their own track.
When the sale comes back
A return may start with an authorisation request, then receives the goods and reverses the value: sales returns debited as contra-revenue, stock back in, tax reversed, the customer’s balance reduced. A replacement does the swap in a single transaction — the medium comes back, the large goes out, and the price difference is settled either way — which is what a size, colour, warranty or upgrade exchange actually is, rather than a return and a fresh sale pretending not to be related.
Why two companies run this differently
Almost every behavioural decision a sales document makes — what it copies from the document it was generated from, how it reserves quantity, how it prices and taxes its lines, what it posts, and which documents it generates next — is carried by its document term. One document type can have several terms, each tuned to a different process. That is why a wholesale order, a project sale and a consignment can share a system without one of them being a workaround.
The journey, pricing layers, returns and the term engine are documented in the sales journey and pricing, offers and coupons.
