Arabic-Indic numerals

Invoices in two scripts

A group buying connectivity across the Gulf receives invoices in Arabic and English, often on one page. They are correct, they are legible to their intended reader, and they are hard on a reader written for one script.

Riopex adds bill readers provider by provider, bilingual Arabic and English layouts included, so a known layout needs no mapping question. A spreadsheet bill is read through a column mapping a person confirms once.

Every bill file is kept exactly as it arrived, so a reviewer can always see what the provider printed.

Digits and separators travel together

Arabic-Indic digits are a different set of characters from the Latin digits, and the separators that travel with them differ too: a decimal mark, a thousands mark and a percent sign of their own.1

The failure is mixing conventions. Read an Arabic decimal mark as a thousands separator and a figure becomes many times itself.

Riopex reads Arabic-Indic digits with the Arabic separators that belong to them, beside the Latin digits on the same invoice.

Three decimals, and tax outside the base

Several currencies in the region carry three decimals, not two. Money is held in whole minor units of its own currency, so a currency with finer units, such as the Kuwaiti dinar, keeps its exact precision.

• Tax rates are dated per country, each valid from the day it took effect.
• A tax charged on top of VAT and outside its base is held as a rate of its own and calculated outside the base.
• Lines must add up to the bill's total, and tax lines to its stated tax, or the bill goes to review.

A Hijri date always asks

An invoice issued on a Hijri date has to be placed on the Gregorian calendar to sit in its month, and at a month's edge the reading can go either way.

Riopex reads a Hijri issue date, then a person confirms it: the date opens a review item, whatever the reading's confidence. A billing period off by a month moves a charge into the wrong close.

From the page to the group's figure

Once read, each amount is held as billed, in the company's own currency and in the group's reporting currency, each converted figure naming the rate that produced it.