Renewal terms in the UAE are not one rule. They differ by Emirate, they differ again by free zone, and they can differ by activity within a single authority. There is no national period this course could quote you and no national fee, and any summary that offers one has generalised from a single authority to a whole country. So before you configure anything, get your own terms from the body that licensed you — your Emirate's licensing department or your free zone authority — and configure what they tell you rather than what a table on the internet tells you.

The mental model: a type is a template, not a rule. A licence type carries no legal meaning. It carries three things — how far ahead to nudge you, whether a scan is required before activation, and which company may use it — and it hands those three to every licence filed under it. Get the template right once and every future record inherits it.

The click path. Go to UAE License › Configuration › Licence Types. You need Licences: Manager to see this menu at all; if it is not there, that is the reason. Open one of the eight seeded types to read it, or create your own.

Reminder offsets. Each type carries its own offsets — the days before expiry at which the module should nudge you, written as a descending list such as 90,60,30,7. Read that as four separate nudges at four separate distances rather than as a countdown: one at ninety days out, one at sixty, one at thirty, one a week before. Choose the longest to match how long your renewal actually takes to complete, which is a fact about your authority and your paperwork rather than a fact about the software.

Requires Document. A type can require a scan before any licence of that type can be activated. It is a small flag with a large effect: it turns "we will attach the PDF later" into a step you cannot skip, and later is exactly when the document turns out to be missing. Set it on the papers you would need to produce at short notice, and leave it clear where you genuinely only track a date.

The Company field. Leave it empty and every company in the database sees the type; set it and the type is private to that company. In a single-company database this makes no difference and you can ignore it. In a group it decides whether a free-zone entity's own permit type appears on the mainland company's screen, and the tidiest habit is to leave the genuinely shared types empty and name the company on the ones only it uses.

No type ships with a default validity period, and that is a decision rather than an omission. Licences are commonly annual. But the module does not assert any renewal period as a legal fact, because putting "12 months" in front of you as a default would lend an invented number the authority of a fact — and you would then have to notice it was invented before it quietly filled in an expiry date nobody checked. No verified source fixes one period for every licence in the country, so the module offers none, and the expiry date stays a field you fill from the document.

Carry that principle into your own data. The same reasoning applies to every field you are tempted to fill from memory. If you do not know the expiry date, do not put a plausible one in to make the record look complete: an invented date is worse than an empty one, because an empty field asks a question and a wrong date answers it. Type what the document says, and where the document says nothing, leave it empty and go and find out.

A suggested starting point. The table below is the module's suggestion and your decision. Nothing in it is a legal requirement, and no row asserts that your company holds that document, that it expires at all, or when. Use it as a checklist for the conversation with your authority, then delete the rows that do not apply to you.

Read the offsets column the same way. They are round numbers chosen to be useful, not periods anyone has ruled on. If your renewal genuinely takes four months of approvals, ninety days of warning is late and your first offset should be longer. If it takes an afternoon, a long lead time only produces an activity nobody acts on. Set the longest offset to your real lead time and let the shorter ones do the chasing.

Worked example. Falcon Ridge Interiors LLC keeps five types: Trade Licence, Establishment Card, Tenancy Registration, Municipality Permit and Insurance Policy. Cobalt Freight FZ-LLC keeps four: Trade Licence, Establishment Card, Insurance Policy, and a type its office manager adds by hand called Zone Facility Agreement — because the zone's lease is not a tenancy registration, and filing it under that name would be recording a document under a name it does not have. Both companies set Requires Document on the trade licence and leave it clear on the insurance policies, which are renewed by a broker who sends the certificate afterwards.

The failure mode. A type configured with offsets that all sit inside the time the renewal takes. Everything works, every reminder fires, and every one of them arrives too late to act on — which reads as a software problem and is a configuration problem. This is exactly why offsets are per type: a permit you can renew online in a morning and a licence that needs three approvals do not deserve the same warning.