Arabic First, Not Arabic Later

Plenty of systems are available in Arabic. Far fewer were designed in it, and the difference shows up in the places nobody demonstrates: the cheque that reads grammatically, the contract date that needs to be Hijri, the field your industry calls something else entirely.

Nama ERP is Arabic ERP software in the stronger sense. The interface is Arabic and right-to-left throughout, English is there when you want it, and French is supported as an alternative to English. But the interesting part is underneath.

Amounts in words, in real Arabic

Writing an amount in words is trivial in English: pound and pounds, and you are done. Arabic is harder, because a noun changes form according to how many of it there are — one riyal, two riyals, three to ten riyals, eleven and above.

So the system stores four forms of every currency name and four of its fraction name, plus the gender flags that make the sentence agree, and about forty currencies arrive already filled in — the Arab world and the major international ones. A missing form produces a grammatically wrong sentence on a cheque, which is exactly the kind of document where that gets noticed.

An ERP that ships one Arabic word per currency is telling you something about where it was written.

Hijri where it belongs, not everywhere

Hijri support in most systems is a toggle: on, and now every date on every screen has a second date under it that nobody reads.

Nama treats it as a list. You name an entity and one of its date fields — a contract signature date, an employee hire date — and the system puts a Hijri companion beside that field, on that screen. The display format is yours: the order of day, month and year, the separator between them, whether single digits are padded so columns line up. Reports and printed documents can render the Hijri equivalent of any date, and a property lease can run on a Hijri schedule.

Add the dates that genuinely need it, not every date in the system.

Your vocabulary, not the vendor’s

Every organisation has words it insists on. A shortcut inside the system (Alt+Ctrl+T) reveals an edit button beside any field or heading; you change the wording there and then, in Arabic, English or both, and export the result when you are satisfied.

What can be retranslated is broader than field names: screens — singular for the edit view, plural for the list — page titles, groups, and system actions. A change can be scoped to one screen, to a named list of screens, or applied everywhere the field appears.

This is the quiet reason implementations go faster. Arguments about terminology stop being change requests and become an afternoon.

The documentation, too

More than 850 pages of the product documentation are published in Arabic, and the monthly release notes are written in Arabic first. That is not a feature, but it is a fair test of whether a vendor’s Arabic is structural or decorative — and it is worth applying to everyone on your shortlist.