Software Business in the Middle East

The payment options preferred by customers in UAE and Saudi Arabia for the purchased software seem to be specific for the region. For me the easiest way would be just to make a bank transfer, but I guess that customers here have another habits.

Payment by Cheque

This is the most popular way of payment, I think about 95% of our customers pay this way. Your customer gets the product giving you a cheque for the certain amount. Then you can get cash by this cheque after the certain date. To be honest, before coming to Dubai I had no idea that anywhere in the World people pay by cheques rather than simply transfer money from their bank accounts.

It’s also worth saying that payment by cheque is very popular for private people too. For example, most likely you will pay your rent by giving away four postdated cheques. Sometimes the landlord will ask for one cheque only, so you have to pay for your apartment or office one year in advance.

If cheque is given away, but there is no money on an account – this is the worst thing that might happen. The punishment for the bounced cheque might be even imprisoning.

After the date on the cheque, it will normally take another 2 or 3 days before you get your money. It is also common that customer puts the date on the cheque couple of weeks from now, so the customer gets payment deferral.

Today, for example, one of our customers got software, and now it will take their financial department two weeks to issue the cheque. I also bet they will put payment date on it two weeks later, so they get a nice one month payment deferral.

Cash

It is not so common as cheques, but still some customers prefer to pay by cash. It is OK if the amount is not large, and I hope nobody will pay cash for a large purchase.

Bank Transfer

It is not common at all. Maybe it’s because customer must pay about $10 for the transfer between banks in UAE. Just to compare, it costs about $6 if you want to transfer money from a bank in Saudi Arabia to a bank in UAE.

But even then it is almost impossible for some of the customers to make a bank transfer from Saudi Arabia to UAE. In January this year one customer issued a cheque on the name of our Saudi partner instead of direct bank transfer to UAE. I would understand if the customer were a small company, but it was one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the World.

It will really solve many issues when banks will make their charges less for bank transfers. This is a real headache sometimes to visit bank leaving cheques and cash over there, especially now when traffic in Dubai is getting worse and worse.

Credit Cards

Credit Cards are not used for payment for the software if it’s not purchased over Internet or in the retail shop, of course. Also don’t forget about the mentality of the people in this part of the World – they prefer to meet with a seller to talk face-to-face, rather than to go to the Internet for making purchase.

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Couple months ago I got the issue that might cost mе the entire week of my work.

I used to make backup of all critical data from my laptop once a week. In the middle of January, just before I left for a short vacation, I went to another room in my home to pick up the external hard disk to make a final backup of everything I’d been working with for the past few days. It takes normally about 3 seconds to pick up the hard disk and come back, so I left a cup of tea just next to my laptop as my 10-month son was playing with my wife at this time.

When I came back to my desk (and it took me the standard 3 seconds), I saw a very nice picture. My son was staying at my desk with my cup of tea in his hand spilling tea on my laptop…

The first thought was ”good that he hasn’t hurt himself by hot tea”. The second thought was “we need to learn that wherever he is not able to reach today, he will be able to reach in a couple of days”. And the third thought was ”good-bye my vacation as I would need to restore all my work made for the past week”. And the last week work was very productive, unfortunately.

When I lifted my laptop up, it was leaking with tea as a small lake. The display was blinking, getting spots and finally, the computer died.

I removed the back cover and dried the laptop using hair dryer of my wife. I was just lucky that my farther-in-law got a friend who’s smart enough to fix my computer for just a few hours at night. He just told that it’s good that tea had no sugar in it.

The main conclusion from this story is that backup must be made daily. But it takes time to copy all my data to the external hard disk – only e-mails take more than 1 GB at the moment. I think that backup would be some kind of incremental one. Like if I make full backup once a week, and then I just make an incremental backup of all the changed file for the passed day, or since the last backup. I would be able to save all those incremental backups on a USB Flash Drive even.

So I have a question to those who read this blog – do you use any backup software for your personal computer? Are you aware of any such incremental backup tools that would allow making reliable backups fast and for the reasonable price?

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