Frequently Asked Questions

The best property management software for Saudi Arabia must handle four local requirements: Ejar contract documentation, Hijri calendar dates, ZATCA-compliant electronic invoicing with 15% VAT on commercial rent, and full Arabic right-to-left support. Generic international systems and spreadsheets miss all four. Evaluate any platform against these criteria before looking at price or feature count.

Yes. Documenting residential and commercial lease contracts on the Ejar platform has been mandatory in Saudi Arabia since 2018. A documented unified lease contract is an executive instrument, enforceable through the Execution Court without filing a prior lawsuit. Undocumented contracts lose this protection and cannot be enforced directly.

Ejar contract documentation costs 125 SAR per year for a residential lease and 200 SAR per year for a commercial lease in Saudi Arabia. The fee is paid by the lessor or the licensed real estate office managing the property, and is charged per contract per year, not per unit.

No for residential, yes for commercial. Residential rent in Saudi Arabia is exempt from VAT, while commercial rent is subject to 15% VAT collected from the tenant and remitted to ZATCA. Registration with ZATCA is mandatory once annual taxable revenue exceeds 375,000 SAR. Property sales fall under the 5% Real Estate Transaction Tax instead.

A Fal license is the official authorization from the Real Estate General Authority (REGA) required for anyone practicing real estate brokerage, marketing, or property management in Saudi Arabia. It costs 300 SAR per year for an individual practitioner. Operating without a valid Fal license carries fines reaching 200,000 SAR.

Through three separate channels. A lease documented on Ejar is an executive instrument, so a claim for unpaid rent goes directly to the Execution Court and is typically processed within about five days. Substantive disputes over contract validity or damages go to the General Court. The Saudi Center for Real Estate Arbitration handles mediation and arbitration by agreement.

FIFO (first-in, first-out) allocation applies each incoming payment to the oldest unpaid installment first, before any newer one. If a tenant owes March and April and pays one month of rent, the system clears March. This produces an accurate arrears age, prevents a partial payment from being spread randomly, and matches how execution claims are calculated.

Because Saudi lease contracts, government deadlines, and Ejar records frequently use Hijri dates, while accounting and banking run on Gregorian. The Hijri year is about 354 days, eleven shorter than the Gregorian year, so a contract dated by Hijri months drifts against a Gregorian schedule. Software without dual-date handling produces wrong due dates and renewal reminders.

ZATCA compliance means issuing each commercial rent invoice through the Fatoora e-invoicing system in the required structured format, with a QR code, seller and buyer tax details, and 15% VAT shown separately. It applies to every VAT-registered lessor. Residential rent is VAT-exempt, so it does not require a tax invoice.

Indirectly. In practice, contract documentation is completed through a licensed real estate office that receives the request, reviews it, and submits it on the Ejar platform. The useful role of software is preparing complete, validated contract data — parties, unit, rent, and installment schedule — so the accredited office can document it without corrections or delay.

There is no fixed minimum. The practical test is how many dates you track manually: one annual contract with monthly installments generates 12 due dates plus a renewal date. Five units means 65 dates per year. Past that volume, a manual spreadsheet starts dropping reminders, and arrears surface only after the easy collection window has closed.

Yes. Modern property management apps let you record a payment, check a tenant's balance, receive an arrears alert, and open contract details from a phone. The biggest practical gain is recording a payment the moment it is received rather than noting it for later, since delayed entry is the leading source of discrepancies in tenant statements.

Record the amount received against the oldest outstanding installment and keep the remainder open at its original due date. A tenant owing 10,000 SAR who pays 6,000 still carries 4,000 in arrears dated to the old due date, not today. Editing the original installment amount instead of logging a partial payment corrupts the arrears age and weakens an execution claim.

Four reports are enough each month: collected versus due, to measure the collection rate; arrears aging, to see how long each amount has been outstanding; expenses per property, to expose the costliest unit; and contracts expiring within the next 90 days. The fourth matters most, since renewal negotiation needs lead time before a unit sits vacant.

Log every request against the specific unit rather than the property as a whole, with request date, status, and actual cost. After 12 months this reveals which unit consumes the most. A unit costing 8,000 SAR a year in maintenance against 30,000 SAR in rent absorbs 27% of its income — a figure that never appears when expenses are pooled at property level.

Amlaki is a cloud platform for property and rental management built for the Saudi and Gulf markets. It covers the full contract cycle from unit and tenant through installments, collection, expenses, and owner settlement, with 11 reports, 8 currencies, 3 languages, and dual Hijri-Gregorian dates. It serves six user types across web and mobile.

Yes, Amlaki supports 8 currencies covering the six Gulf states plus the US dollar and the euro. The currency is set at account level and flows through contracts, invoices, and reports in its correct format — what an office managing portfolios in more than one country needs.

Amlaki supports 3 languages: Arabic, English, and Turkish. The Arabic interface is built fully right-to-left rather than translated text placed inside a left-to-right layout, and that includes tables, reports, and printed documents. Each user selects their own language independently within the same account.

Yes. Amlaki offers a permanently free plan covering 2 properties and 20 units, plus a 14-day free trial of any paid plan with no credit card required. Paid plans start at 99 SAR per month, or the equivalent of 79 SAR per month on annual billing.

Six user types, each with different permissions: the real estate office, the independent owner, the owner linked to an office, the tenant, the office staff member, and the system administrator. The separation means a linked owner sees only their own properties and a tenant sees only their own contract and payments, with neither able to view anyone else's data.