The paperwork all looks the same
A buyer likes villa B-12 on Tuesday. On Friday he puts 20,000 down to take it off the market. A fortnight later the notarised contract is signed, and eight months after that he collects the keys. Four moments, four pieces of paper — and on screen all four look almost identical: the same unit breadcrumb, the same price block, the same grid of dated instalments.
What separates them is not what they show. It is what they do: whether the unit comes off the market, and whether anything at all reaches the ledger. Getting that wrong is how a developer ends up with revenue recognised eight months early, or a unit sold twice.
Intent, then commitment
A sales offer is a printed quotation carrying a full simulated plan. It reserves nothing and needs no accounting configuration whatsoever, so a salesperson can issue one on the first day of the installation. A temporary reservation is a hold whose validity window is measured to the hour, and it is honest about writing nothing to the unit. The reservation document is the first instrument with teeth: confirming it, which is a separate act from committing it, takes the unit off the market and posts the deposit as a single debit and credit.
Then the one that surprises people. An initial sales contract can carry the full price, sixty scheduled lines and both signatures, and it can lock the unit — and it still produces no journal entry at all. Its document term has settings and no accounts, because there is nothing for accounts to do.
The sales contract is where that changes. Committing it marks the unit sold, writes the buyer onto the property record, closes off the reservation behind it and turns the plan into a receivable. It is the only document in the family that recognises the price of the property, and it divides that price by due date as it posts: lines inside the document’s own fiscal year are income, everything later is deferred.
The plan is described, not typed
A price block derives the figure from areas and metre rates, or accepts the one you give it, subtracts the down payment and whatever was paid on reservation, and adds fees and the maintenance deposit. A construction block then describes the shape of what remains — how many lines, how far apart, rounded to what multiple, and where the rounding residue goes. A grid beneath it handles plans with more than one shape: quarterly while the building goes up, monthly after delivery.
One button turns that description into lines, and it replaces the grid rather than topping it up. Build the plan before the first collection: once a line has been paid its code is frozen and the contract will refuse to lose it. A live schedule is changed with an extension that adds lines, or with an early-settlement merge that collapses a range into one discounted line — never by regenerating. The model is walked through in building the instalment plan.
The broker is owed the day the contract commits
Naming a broker in the contract header does nothing. The commissions grid is what books. Each line takes its percentage from a basis carried by the commission type — the unit price, the contract’s remaining value, or one of the free numeric fields on the unit or the contract — and posts from the commission type’s own accounts, not from the sales term. Paying the broker later is an ordinary payment voucher and moves nothing on the contract.
Two things follow. A commission type with only one side configured books nothing, silently, which is where to look when an entry comes out short. And because the expense lands at signature rather than at payment, undoing the sale has to unwind it — a switch that reverses the commission sides, not a manual journal.
There is no cancel-sale button
Nothing in the module cancels a sales contract. A contract raised on the wrong unit in the wrong month with nothing collected against it is un-committed. Everything else is a waiver, and a waiver is a sale viewed from the other end: the same screen, seeded with the unpaid lines of the contract being given up, so the instalments already collected stay where they belong.
Its type decides what happens to the property. For another buyer is a resale before completion — the unit never returns to stock and the incoming buyer takes over the remaining lines. For company brings it back. Either way the original contract is stamped and frozen, and every change after that is made on the waiver rather than behind it. There is also a cancellation request: a routing record naming the unit, the parties and the commissions to be settled. Approving one reverses nothing. Both routes are set out in waivers and cancelling a sale.
Handover, and the cost that arrives late
Delivery is a small document with a mandatory link back to the contract, and it does two things beyond changing a status. Where the contract’s term was set to hold its journal entry back until the unit is delivered — this is how “recognise revenue on delivery” is configured — the handover is what releases it. And it is the line after which construction cost can no longer be capitalised into the unit: a separate document sweeps what lands afterwards and nets off everything booked before it, so a snagging invoice in September charges only the increment since June.
Leasing the same stock is a different chain of documents — see renting units out — and the whole property stack sits on the property company page. The selling chain itself is in the property sales cycle.
