Troubleshooting

Most "is something broken?" moments in WAQAF turn out to be the system working exactly as designed — a role hiding a button, a guard stopping a duplicate, a balance behaving as the rules say it should. This page walks through the problems people hit most often, explains what's really happening, and tells you how to put it right. Each one is short; jump to the section that matches what you're seeing.

A button or whole section is missing

This is by far the most common one, and it's almost never a fault. WAQAF gives every person one or more roles in each organisation, and the dashboard hides anything your role can't reach — so the screen stays relevant to your job. If a colleague sees Record income and you don't, it's because their role grants it and yours doesn't.

A few quick checks, in order:

• Your role. A read-only role sees the lists but not the add, edit, or approve buttons. That split between looking at and changing something is deliberate.
• The right organisation. WAQAF can host several organisations and your role can differ in each. Check the name and logo at the top of the sidebar; switch if you're in the wrong one.
• The approval step. Some buttons are visible but only active when it's your turn — expense approval runs Accountant, then Finance Manager, then CEO.

The full explanation, with screenshots, lives in Why can't I see a button?. The cure for a genuinely missing feature is a role change, made by an Owner or Org Admin — see Assigning roles.

An email or receipt didn't arrive

WAQAF sends email for invitations, approvals, paid-voucher receipts, and similar moments. If someone says a message never came, work through this:

• Check the spam or junk folder first. This is the single most common cause. Ask the recipient to look there and, if they find it, mark it "not spam" so the next one lands in the inbox.
• Confirm the address is exactly right. A receipt only goes to the address recorded on the voucher or the payee — a typo there means the mail is delivered to the wrong place, not bounced back to you. Open the record and check the email field.
• Give it a few minutes. Mail is sent in the background, just after the action that triggered it, so a short delay is normal — it is never sent on the click itself.
• Check it was meant to send at all. A paid-voucher receipt is only sent when your organisation has turned that on and a recipient email is present. If the setting is off or the email is blank, no message is sent — that's not a failure.

Saving income is blocked as a "duplicate reference"

When you record income, you can enter the bank or gateway reference for that receipt. WAQAF keeps each reference unique within your organisation, so the same payment can never be entered twice by accident. If you try to save a reference that's already been used, WAQAF stops you and shows you the record that already has it — its DON number, amount, date, and who recorded it.

This is a safeguard, not an obstacle. Read what it tells you and decide:

• It really is the same receipt — already entered by you or a colleague. Don't re-enter it; just close the form. The first record stands.
• It's a different receipt that happens to share a reference, or you mistyped — correct the reference field and save again. A reference left blank is always allowed, so if there genuinely is no external reference, leave it empty.

An expense voucher exceeds the available balance

When you create a payment voucher, WAQAF shows whether the category has enough to cover it. You might expect it to block an over-spend — but it doesn't, and that's deliberate. A voucher whose amount is more than the category's available balance is allowed: it is recorded, and the category balance simply goes negative (shown in red). This matches how charities actually work, where a commitment sometimes has to be made before the funds are fully in place.

So if you see a red, negative balance after a voucher, nothing has gone wrong — it is telling you the truth about that category. You have two ways to respond:

• Leave it and bring the category back into the black with later income.
• Use the optional second "deduct" line on the voucher to move the overflow onto another category that does have the funds, so neither ends up misrepresented.

A date error stops a posting going through

Every income and expense in WAQAF lands in the ledger against a date, and that date has to fall inside an open accounting period. If you pick a date that no open period covers — most commonly a date in a future year — the posting is refused with a period-related message, and nothing is written.

The usual culprit is a typo in the date, or a deliberately future date such as next year. Check the date you entered:

• For a normal, current transaction, the date should be today or a recent past date — fix it and save again.
• If you genuinely need to record something dated in a period that isn't open yet, that isn't something you can force from the form. Ask your Finance Manager; opening a new period is an organisation-level step, not a per-entry one.

A file upload fails

You can attach a document to an income record, an expense, or a voucher — a bank slip, a PDF, a photo of a receipt. If an upload won't go through, check these:

• File type. WAQAF accepts PDF, PNG, and JPEG. A different format (a Word document, a HEIC photo from a phone, a spreadsheet) is rejected. Convert it to PDF or a standard image first.
• A weak or interrupted connection. Uploads happen straight from your browser; a dropped connection mid-upload fails the whole file. Wait for a stable connection and try once more.
• Very large files. A huge scan can time out. Re-scan at a lower resolution, or save the PDF at a smaller size, then retry.

You can't publish your website

Publishing turns your site live for the public. If the Publish button won't complete, there are two common reasons:

• The home page isn't complete enough yet. WAQAF won't publish a site whose home page is still missing its essentials — the main heading and the call-to-action that invites visitors to give. Open the home page in the editor, fill those in, save, then publish again. (You can keep editing a draft freely; the check only applies at the moment you publish.)
• Your role can't publish. Editing a site and publishing it are separate permissions. A Site Editor can build and change pages but can't take the site live; publishing needs the Site Manager (or an Owner/Org Admin). If you can edit but the Publish button is absent or refuses you, ask a Site Manager to publish it.

When it really is a fault

If you've worked through the relevant section above and the behaviour still doesn't make sense — an error with no clear cause, a figure that looks plainly wrong, or a page that won't load — it's worth reporting. Note exactly what you did, what you expected, and what happened instead (a screenshot helps), then follow Getting support.

Remember that WAQAF handles real money, so many of its "no" answers are guards doing their job: a duplicate stopped, a closed period protected, a sensitive figure hidden from a role that shouldn't see it. Those are features, not faults — the Frequently asked questions page covers why several of them work the way they do.

See also