Some of the accountants Abdullah AlDayel approached were worried about helping him. He wanted their expertise to develop Qoyod, an accounting platform for business owners. They could see a less agreeable possibility: software that might take their place. A founder offering to simplify the books had discovered that the books came with people attached.
It was an awkward problem to have at the beginning. Building an accounting product without accountants would be a peculiar economy. Yet asking professionals to contribute to a tool they feared could erode their livelihoods was hardly a straightforward sales pitch. The disagreement went beyond whether a screen was easy to use. It concerned who would do the work once the screen existed.
Qoyod’s answer was that digital records could give accountants a better starting point. The routine entries would already be there when a business needed someone to audit its accounts or analyse its financial statements. The company wanted to make their work easier and open a new market for it. There was still a role for judgment after the machinery had finished counting.
That early encounter gives AlDayel’s career a useful shape. The Saudi founder and CEO has spent years trying to put technical systems within reach of smaller businesses. Getting there required more than an interest in technology. He had to persuade people that a simpler process could serve them, including people whose professional value had long been tied to understanding the complicated version.
A reseller changes his mind
AlDayel came to the problem through IT governance and project management. Before Qoyod, he worked at the National Water Company, where his experience included compliance, release management and the development of IT governance. Earlier roles at Integrated Telecom Company and Saudi Research & Publishing Company exposed him to projects, digital systems and content management. His working life brought business requirements and technology into the same room.
His education followed that intersection. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a focus on management information systems from Al Yamamah University, and an MBA from Prince Sultan University. The combination matters to the story because the eventual product concerned the daily running of a business as much as the software underneath it.
His original commercial plan was different. He started Auto Cloud, the entity operating Qoyod, intending to resell international cloud solutions in Saudi Arabia. Then he concluded that those products did not meet the local market’s needs. Selling an existing solution would have been one kind of business. Developing a local accounting system became another.
The change of direction is the hinge in his story. He did not need to invent the cloud to see a gap. He needed to notice the distance between what available software offered and what a local owner could comfortably use. Language, business practice and the financial reporting environment were part of the product problem. A catalogue of international software could not settle it for him.
The invoice gets a second job
The early work on Qoyod dates to 2014; the company’s published milestones place its establishment in 2016, and AlDayel described the program’s official start as 2017. Those stages form a more useful picture than a single birthday: an idea developed into a company, then into a product being offered to business owners.
By June 2017, he was explaining a deliberately ordinary advantage. Owners could access Qoyod through a computer or smartphone without installing the software on their own devices. Monthly and annual subscriptions offered a way into the service. The point was to let the owner get on with financial management without first acquiring another technical chore.
The original bundles reflected different kinds of businesses. A free package allowed a startup to create up to 100 sales invoices with one user. Other packages accommodated more users and invoices, or businesses with showrooms and outlets that needed point of sale. These were the early offers, a record of how the product met owners at different stages.
At the centre was a modest piece of automation with considerable practical appeal: entering a transaction could also produce its accounting record. An invoice had a second job. The owner did not have to treat selling something and recording the sale as entirely separate exercises. Reliable reports start with the unglamorous matter of getting the entries into the books.
Accounting has a talent for becoming interesting just when a business discovers it has misunderstood its own position. AlDayel’s product approached the subject earlier in the day, while transactions were happening. That choice connected his old concern with aligning IT and business to a concrete task an entrepreneur could recognise.
Two rounds, one local argument
In July 2018, Qoyod announced seed investment from Kuwait’s Arzan VC. The amount was undisclosed. At the time, the company reported more than 600 business clients and had been incubated at Badir in Riyadh. AlDayel’s intention was to develop the product further, while building toward a wider financial offering for small and medium enterprises.
The investment gave his local argument an external audience. A subscription accounting system had to be useful enough for customers to keep paying for it. The reporting needs of small businesses supplied the problem; accessible software supplied a possible answer. For AlDayel, the next step was to expand what the same relationship with an owner could support.
December 2020 brought a $2.1 million Series A led by Merak Capital, with other investors participating. Qoyod was serving thousands of businesses and working on a broader product offering and regional reach. AlDayel said the customer base and revenue had grown significantly that year. He also described the Saudi market as a large opportunity still only partly addressed.
Merak’s investment thesis put particular weight on local operational challenges and a competitive, localised approach. That was recognisably the problem AlDayel had encountered when he considered reselling international tools. The appeal of Qoyod lay in understanding the environment in which its customers actually worked. Its ambitions could travel; its usefulness still needed a local address.
Amount undisclosed
Led by Merak Capital
Rules become part of the product
As Qoyod developed, Saudi electronic invoicing became part of its work. The platform supports the requirements of the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority, including the second phase of integration. For a business owner, invoicing is both an everyday transaction and a regulated process. Software serving that owner has to accommodate both roles.
This is familiar ground for someone with AlDayel’s governance background. A system can look convenient and still fail to fit the organisation using it. His professional history includes the less theatrical side of technology: service management, assets, compliance and releases. Those concerns become visible to a customer when a service runs reliably or when it does not.
The accounting platform has expanded to include inventory, point of sale, financial reports and a bookkeeping service. That last offering is an interesting companion to the early accountants’ objection. Owners who want a specialist to handle the books can use a service built around the platform. Human expertise remains part of the proposition.
Qoyod now describes itself as trusted by more than 25,000 Saudi businesses. It is a company-reported measure of adoption, rather than a score for AlDayel personally. Even so, it captures the change in the job before him: a founder once explaining why owners might use cloud accounting is now responsible for a service on which many businesses depend.
A restaurant is another kind of ledger
In January 2026, Qoyod’s acquisition of Flavours took the company further into restaurant technology. Flavours specialises in point-of-sale systems and restaurant operations management. The move extended the financial software business into a setting where sales and operations happen continuously, and where the eventual accounts are connected to many small actions.
For AlDayel, it continued an ambition he had expressed in 2018: “We ultimately aspire to be the one-stop financial solution for SMEs in the region.” The acquisition brought a specialist business into that wider direction. It also changed the founder’s task from developing one platform to bringing together capabilities developed by different teams.
There is a practical distinction between announcing that ambition and completing the connections. Qoyod’s help centre says accounting transactions from Q Flavours do not currently sync automatically to Qoyod, and that integration is under development. The acquisition therefore belongs in the story as an expansion of scope, with the connection between products still being worked on.
That detail suits the career better than a frictionless tale of growth. AlDayel started because available tools did not fit the business problem well enough. Buying another tool does not retire that problem. It creates a fresh version of it: how to make the separate parts serve an owner’s daily work with fewer loose ends.
“We ultimately aspire to be the one-stop financial solution for SMEs in the region.”Abdullah AlDayel · 2018
Back to the question of trust
On 23 February 2026, AlDayel joined Merak Capital founder and CEO Abdullah Altamami at a Qoyod Community session in Riyadh. Osama Abdulrahman Alashmawi moderated. Its title asked how Qoyod had earned the trust of local companies. The founder and the investor were considering the same business from different positions.
The setting was The Stage on Anas Ibn Malik Road, and the discussion was scheduled for 10 pm. It is a pleasing hour for a conversation about accounting software: late enough for the day’s transactions to be behind you, early enough to wonder what they meant. The subjects included growth, technology-sector expansion and decisions made along the way.
AlDayel was also listed in LEAP’s 2026 speaker programme for a session on automating business operations. The theme fits the work he has pursued since Qoyod’s beginnings. What happens inside a company, after the sale and before the report, has occupied much of his professional life.
His story keeps returning to the people who must use the system. There is the owner confronted with accounting software, the accountant wondering about a changing profession, the investor assessing a local opportunity and the restaurant operator waiting for products to connect. AlDayel’s work sits among them. The books may be made easier; earning the confidence of the people around them remains a substantial occupation.