Lesson 4 — Running a provision: Compute, review, Post
The monthly act is short. Everything difficult about it happened in Lesson 3.
- Go to Employees → End-of-Service Provisions and create a record.
- Set the period, Period From and Period To.
- Click Compute. One line appears per employee, showing their continuous service, the basic wage used, the entitlement before the cap, the statutory cap, and the accrual for this period.
- Review the lines. The Capped flag marks anyone the two-years'-wage ceiling has bitten.
- Click Post. A single journal entry is created for the whole run, debiting the expense account and crediting the liability account, and the run is locked.
Before any of that will post, three accounts must exist. Set the EOSB Journal, the EOSB Expense Account and the EOSB Liability Account on the company. Until all three are set the module refuses to post, and the message names exactly which are missing. That refusal is deliberate: it will not guess an account, because a balanced entry posted to the wrong place is harder to find than one that never posted at all.
Reading the four numbers on a line. Entitlement Before Cap is what Article 51(1) produces from service and basic wage. Statutory Cap is two years' wage, from the cap wage fields. Cumulative Provision is the entitlement actually carried after any cap. Accrual This Period is the cumulative figure less what earlier posted runs already provided — and that last one is the amount that hits the ledger.
The worked example. The August 2026 run for a company with our three employees, where July was computed and posted in the normal way.
| Employee | Continuous service | Entitlement Before Cap | Statutory Cap | Cumulative Provision | Accrual This Period |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rania | 7 years and 6 months | AED 72,000 | AED 576,000 | AED 72,000 | AED 1,000 |
| Marco | 28 years and 8 months | AED 244,500 | AED 432,000 | AED 244,500 | AED 750 |
| Aisha | 4 months | AED 1,400 | AED 288,000 | AED 1,400 | AED 350 |
| Total | AED 317,900 | AED 317,900 | AED 2,100 |
Post produces one journal entry for the run: AED 2,100 debited to the EOSB expense account, AED 2,100 credited to the EOSB liability account. Each monthly accrual is simply that person's annual day-count divided by twelve, priced at their daily rate — 2.5 days at AED 400 for Rania, 2.5 days at AED 300 for Marco, and 1.75 days at AED 200 for Aisha.
Four rules about runs that will save you a support call. One provision per company per period, enforced at database level, so the same period cannot be run twice. A posted run is locked, and recomputing it requires you to reverse or cancel its journal entry, reset the run to draft, and compute again. If nothing has moved in the period, the run is marked posted without creating an empty journal entry. And the provision survives a cancelled payslip, because it posts its own journal entry rather than riding on payroll — the liability exists whether or not payroll ran.
Automating it, when you are ready. Enable Settings → Technical → Scheduled Actions → "End-of-Service: monthly provision". It then computes and posts the previous month's provision for every configured company. If it skips a company, the reason is written to that company's provision record in the chatter, because one misconfigured company is skipped rather than being allowed to stop the others. On rights: HR officers can read provisions, HR managers can create, compute and post them, and companies only ever see their own.
The failure mode. The refusal to post reads as a bug and is not one. If the module tells you the provision cannot be posted until the journal, expense account and liability account are configured, it has already told you which one is missing — the fix is on the company form, not in the run. The genuinely dangerous version of this is the opposite: pointing the liability account at a general accrual account that something else also uses. It will post, it will balance, and Lesson 8 will show you a difference you cannot explain.