Qoyod: the Saudi platform that never calls itself an ERP

Every other system in this series calls itself an ERP. Qoyod does not, not in a single place. That is neither an accident nor marketing modesty — it is the most accurate description of what the customer is buying, and the most important fact on this page. Anyone buying Qoyod as an ERP is buying something other than what they think. Anyone buying it as the best Saudi ZATCA-compliant accounting platform is probably buying correctly.

Origin and ownership

Qoyod is a Saudi cloud accounting platform, founded in 2016, based in Riyadh. Its about page describes it as the first 100% Saudi cloud accounting platform, launched to close the technology gap in financial management for small and medium enterprises.

The correction that has to precede everything else: Qoyod does not call itself an ERP anywhere on its site, and the evidence is the site’s own structure rather than an impression. Every product path begins with /accounting-software/. All twelve sector pages, without exception, are named accounting-software-for- plus the sector: manufacturing, contracting, retail, restaurants, law firms, tourism and the rest. The standing footer text on every page describes the company as being at the forefront of advanced accounting solutions. Accounting solutions, not enterprise resources.

The timeline that explains the product’s market position, published by the company itself:

Year	Milestone
2016	Founded as the first Saudi cloud accounting platform
2019	Point of sale and inventory management added
2021	ZATCA approval for e-invoicing
2023	Phase-two integration launched, with a sandbox environment
2026	More than 25,000 active organisations, and expansion into Jordan

2021 is the milestone that made the company. When ZATCA mandated e-invoicing, early approval was an advantage money could not buy, and its effect is still visible in the company’s share today. The figures it publishes about itself: more than 25,000 organisations, more than 100,000 monthly users, more than 25 million accounting transactions a month, and a Google rating of 4.8 out of 5 across more than 1,200 reviews. Those are the vendor’s own numbers, not an independent party’s, and should be read as such.

Who it fits

Small and micro Saudi businesses whose problem is an invoice, a tax return and compliance rather than a production line or a supply chain. Accounting practices managing the books of dozens of clients — Qoyod has a dedicated product for that case, with a portfolio dashboard, reusable manual-entry templates and per-client permissions. Retail and restaurants needing point of sale wired straight into the ledger. Companies whose interface must be entirely Arabic, because Arabic here is not a translation of an English UI — it is the product. And anyone who wants to start today without a vendor, a quotation or a meeting: fourteen days free, no credit card, self-service signup.

It does not fit a factory with routings and finite capacity, a group consolidating several legal entities, a company operating in the UAE and needing compliance there, or a company requiring the system to run on its own servers.

What is in it

The core is purely accounting, and these are its exact limits: sales (customers, sales invoices, receipts, credit notes, quotations); purchasing (suppliers, purchase invoices, purchase orders, payment vouchers, debit notes); inventory (items and services, unit conversion, stocktakes, inter-location transfers, assembled products, raw materials, manufacturing orders); accounting (chart of accounts, manual and recurring entries, accounting dimensions, budgets, opening balances, deferred transactions, multi-currency, bank reconciliation); fixed assets (registration, depreciation, transfer, expenses, disposal); projects and tasks, meaning simple tracking rather than delivery management; and e-invoicing across both phases with direct integration to the authority.

What is not in the core matters more than what is. No CRM — that is a separate product, Qoyod CRM. No human resources — that is a separate product, Qoyod HR, and what exists inside the subscription is a payroll report bought per employee. No point of sale inside any plan: an add-on bought per user. No maintenance, no field service, no quality, no demand planning.

Read that list again against the module list in Odoo or ERPNext. The difference is not depth. It is how many parts of a business the system covers at all. That is not a defect; it is the definition of the product.

What it actually costs

A practical note before the numbers: the pricing page is not on the marketing site. The Pricing item in the top navigation is not a link to a page but a dropdown that sends you to the application domain, app.qoyod.com. So the prices are not in the qoyod.com sitemap and are not indexed as one of its pages. The figures below were read from the plan-selection page on 6 September 2026 and cross-checked against the public help-centre article on plans and pricing.

Plans — Saudi riyals, annually:

Plan	Before VAT	Including VAT	Monthly, inc. VAT	Users	Branches
Basic	1,200	1,380	138	1	1
Professional	1,800	2,070	207	3	3
Advanced	3,300	3,795	379.5	5	5
Business	Custom	—	—	Unlimited	Unlimited

Add-ons — Saudi riyals a year, before VAT:

Add-on	Price
Payroll slip	120 per employee
Point of sale	600 per user
Extra user	240 per user
Extra location	480 per location

Now the table that decides which plan you actually need. The public help centre publishes the full feature matrix; these are the rows that change the decision:

Capability	Basic	Professional	Advanced
Sales invoices and receipts	Yes	Yes	Yes
Quotations	No	Yes	Yes
The full purchasing cycle	No	Yes	Yes
Stocktakes and inter-location transfers	No	Yes	Yes
E-invoicing — phase one	Yes	Yes	Yes
E-invoicing — phase two	No	Yes	Yes
API, Salla, Zid and Zapier	No	Yes	Yes
Projects and tasks	No	Yes	Yes
Recurring entries and budgets	No	No	Yes
Accounting dimensions	No	No	Yes
Raw materials and manufacturing orders	No	No	Yes
Fixed assets and depreciation	No	No	Yes
Point of sale and payroll	Add-on	Add-on	Add-on

Three conclusions come out of that table, and all three move the budget.

Basic has no purchasing at all. No suppliers, no purchase invoices, no purchase orders, no payment vouchers. It records half the document cycle. This is not a miniature accounting plan; it is an invoicing plan. Anyone with a single supplier they buy from monthly cannot use it.

Phase-two invoicing starts at Professional. So the real price floor for any business inside the mandate is SAR 1,800 a year, not 1,200. And the difference is regulatory, not optional.

Add-ons accumulate faster than the plan. Take a restaurant on Professional with three points of sale and twenty people on payroll. The plan is 1,800. Point of sale at 600 per user across three users is another 1,800. Payroll at 120 per employee across twenty is 2,400. Total SAR 6,000 a year — more than three times the number it started from. Compute your add-ons before you compare, not after.

Even so, keep the figure in context: ten users on Professional cost 1,800 plus 1,680 for seven extra users, or SAR 3,480 a year for a complete Arabic accounting system wired to the authority. Set that against a single seat of Business Central. Qoyod is not cheap by accident. It is cheap because it does not do what those systems do.

One last note on the displayed price: Advanced currently shows 2,211 instead of 3,300 under a “33% off” tag. The help-centre article calls that discount a Ramadan offer in one place and a year-end offer extended for a limited period in another. And at the bottom of the pricing page itself sits a FAQ entry titled “why don’t you offer discounts?”. Read it for what it is: the displayed price is the price, and the tag is marketing. Do not build a decision on the expiry of an offer that has not expired in a year.

What it does well

Arabic by construction, not by translation. This is the product’s most important property and the hardest for its competitors to answer. The interface, the reports, the invoices and the accounting terminology were all built in Arabic first. Compare that with what is documented in the Zoho guide: the ZATCA-approved Saudi edition lives on an English page with no Arabic counterpart, while the Arabic page warns you in as many words against assuming local compliance. At Qoyod that ambiguity does not exist.

Compliance is the product, not an addition to it. Authority approval since 2021, phase-two integration since 2023, with a sandbox for testing before cutover. Companies that lived through the mandate waves know what that is worth; anyone who did not should read the Focus Softnet guide, where the invoicing page still describes phase two as in force from 1 January 2024.

A very large public content library. Help centre, blog, accounting dictionary, podcast, business templates, VAT and zakat and payroll calculators, release notes, and public API documentation. The sitemap alone carries dozens of sub-sitemaps for help and the dictionary. It is the exact opposite of a vendor that publishes not one document, and the practical consequence is that you can learn the whole system without anyone’s permission.

Self-service signup. Fourteen days free with no credit card. You open an account now and are inside the product in minutes, with no salesperson, no deck and no introductory meeting.

A product designed for the accountant, not only the owner. A dashboard managing multiple client portfolios, manual-entry templates designed once and applied across all clients, automatic cost-centre allocation, and separate permissions per client. The hiring consequence is direct: a Saudi accountant probably already knows Qoyod, so you do not pay the cost of teaching the system to every new employee.

Local support in Arabic on a toll-free number, from a team in the same time zone. That alone separates Qoyod from every global alternative in this series.

Where it breaks

It is not an ERP, and that is the most important line here. The core ends at accounting and inventory. No sales in the enterprise sense — no leads, no opportunities, no pipeline, no follow-up automation; that is a separate product. No human resources — no recruitment, no appraisals, no leave; that is a separate product, and what sits inside the subscription is a payroll report priced per employee. No maintenance, no quality, no field service, no demand planning. Anyone wanting one system to run all of that is in the territory of Odoo, ERPNext or SAP Business One, not of this product.

The manufacturing page promises more than the plan matrix reveals. The manufacturing sector page shows multi-level bills of materials, manufacturing orders, actual versus standard cost, and three-layer stock: raw materials, work in progress, finished goods. The capabilities are real. But the page nowhere states that raw materials and manufacturing orders are available only in the Advanced plan. So the floor for any factory or workshop is SAR 3,300 a year on five users, not the number at the top of the pricing page. Ask for the plan name to be written into the quotation before signature.

Manufacturing stops at costing and does not reach planning. Search the manufacturing sector page for a routing, a work centre, a machine, capacity, scheduling or MRP. None of them exist. What does exist is good production cost accounting: you know a unit’s cost and its margin. That is an entirely different thing from knowing when the quantity will be finished and on which line. A factory that needs scheduling does not buy this; a factory that needs accurate costing alone may find it sufficient.

Every organisation needs its own subscription. The help centre is explicit that you cannot subscribe for two organisations on the same account, and the branches included with a plan are branches of one organisation rather than separate entities. Consolidated reporting, where it exists, is conditional on the subscriptions being under the same legal entity. A group of three companies pays three subscriptions, runs three systems and consolidates by hand. Anyone closing consolidated accounts monthly across entities is in NetSuite territory.

Saudi Arabia first, Jordan second, and nothing else. The only announced expansion outside the Kingdom is Jordan, with dedicated pages for the JoFotara integration. There is no UAE e-invoicing compliance, no Egypt, no Kuwait, no Qatar. A company operating in more than one Gulf country will need two systems, which is the worst thing that can happen to a group trying to unify its books.

Cloud only, with no local option. No installable edition, no private edition. That rules Qoyod out of any case where a client or regulator requires data to remain on specified infrastructure. And in every case, ask where your data is physically stored and get the answer in writing.

Accounting depth starts late on the plan ladder. Fixed assets and depreciation, accounting dimensions, budgets, recurring entries — four capabilities no serious finance function does without, all locked in Advanced. A company with five users that needs depreciation pays 3,300 rather than 1,800, an 83% jump that does not appear in a quick comparison.

Self-service selling cuts both ways. Easy signup means many companies configure themselves in a week. The recurring result: a chart of accounts built on guesswork, opening balances that do not agree, and tax configured wrongly, all discovered at the first return or the first audit. The company itself sells setup, bookkeeping and data-cleaning services, which is a tacit admission that this happens. Budget a few days of an accountant’s time to lay the foundation, however easy the system looks.

Learning it

Qoyod is one of the two easiest systems in this series to start learning, alongside Zoho, for one reason: everything you need is published openly. No licence, no partner to grant you an account, and no documentation behind a customer portal.

Open the fourteen-day trial and pick Professional for the trial specifically, not Basic — Basic has no purchasing, and the purchase cycle is half of what you need to learn. Build the foundation by hand: chart of accounts, tax codes and rates, customers, suppliers, items, opening balances. That step is tedious and it is half the skill; it is the same step self-configuring companies get wrong. Run a complete document cycle — quotation, sales invoice, receipt, then purchase order, supplier invoice, payment voucher — and after every document open the ledger and read the entry behind it. Then issue a real electronic invoice and read what was sent to the authority and what came back; that, rather than invoice data entry, is the skill the Saudi market actually buys today. Then close a full month: reconcile the bank, prepare the VAT return, produce a trial balance, an income statement and a balance sheet. Read the help centre and the accounting dictionary in parallel — the dictionary is a genuine teaching resource independent of the system, free and open to everyone. And if your background is technical, try the API: the documentation is public and the Salla, Zid and Zapier connections are available from Professional upward.

The e-invoice and the month-end close are what separate someone who knows Qoyod from someone who knows the buttons. The close transfers literally to every other system in this series.

Certification and the job market

Be direct: there is no Qoyod certification. No academy, no individual accreditation track, no exam. What exists is four partnership programmes aimed at companies rather than individuals — strategic partnership, referral partnership, technical partners, and support programmes for startups, non-profits and students. None of them is a professional credential.

The labour-market consequence is the same one described in the Zoho guide: a “Qoyod” line on your CV is not a qualification but a claim requiring evidence. Two things convince and nothing else does: a real account you configured from zero, opened in front of the interviewer while you walk through a document cycle, a month-end close and an e-invoice submission; and your ability to explain what each screen does to the ledger.

But there is a difference worth noticing. Demand for Qoyod skills is Saudi and local, not global. That means a market narrower in geography and deeper in concentration. An accountant fluent in Qoyod and ZATCA invoicing finds work easily in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam — and does not carry that qualification to Dubai or Cairo. Anyone wanting a skill that crosses borders should be reading SAP S/4HANA or NetSuite instead of this page.

When to choose something else

Qoyod is the wrong answer if you need one system running sales, HR and maintenance alongside accounting — the core here is accounting and the rest are separate products, so look at Odoo or ERPNext. If you have a factory that needs scheduling — routings, work centres, capacity, MRP — manufacturing here stops at costing; see SAP Business One or ERPNext. If you are a multi-entity group producing consolidated statements, every organisation is its own subscription and the consolidation is manual; NetSuite was built for exactly that. If you have operations in the UAE bound by e-invoicing there, the product carries no UAE compliance, and two systems for one group is a bad decision. If on-premise deployment is a regulatory or contractual condition, there is no local option in any form. And if you want a skill that travels between markets, the system is Saudi and so is the demand.

Outside those six — and especially if you are a small or mid-sized Saudi business wanting correct accounting in Arabic, approved e-invoicing and local support with the least possible friction — Qoyod is not merely a candidate. It is often the right answer that companies spend several times as much to escape, into a system whose modules they will not use a third of.