Software buyer checklist for UAE and India SMBs

Most software decisions in a small business are made across two meetings and a WhatsApp thread. The demo looks good, the price sounds fine, and the questions that decide whether this was a good idea — where the data lives, what leaving costs, what the bill looks like in year two — get asked eighteen months later, by which time the answers are somebody else's problem and yours.

This is the list of questions worth asking instead. It is written for a business operating in the UAE, in India, or in both, because that combination changes several of the answers. Print it, take it into the meeting, and ask every question of every vendor you are considering.

Before the demo: what you are actually buying

• Which specific thing stops on day one? Name the register, the spreadsheet or the WhatsApp group that nobody opens again. If nothing stops, you are adding a system, not replacing one, and the cost is staff time forever.
• Who inside your business owns this after go-live? Not the vendor, not the consultant — the person who answers when a staff member says it is not working. If the answer is the owner, the project will stall the first busy week.
• Are you renting software or commissioning it? A subscription to a product that a hundred businesses use gets fixed when it breaks. A one-off build for you alone gets fixed when the person who wrote it is free.
• What happens to this decision if the person championing it leaves in six months? Write down the answer. It is usually the strongest argument for choosing the simpler option.

Who owns your data, and where it physically sits

This is where the two-country question bites. Data-protection expectations differ between jurisdictions, customers in the Gulf increasingly ask where records are held, and "it is on the cloud" is not an answer to any of it.

• Who owns the data you put in — in the contract, in writing, not on a sales call? Ask them to point at the clause.
• Which country do the servers physically sit in? "AWS" is not an answer. "ap-south-1, Mumbai" or "me-central-1, UAE" is an answer.
• Where are the backups, and is that the same country? A database resident in one country with backups in another is still a cross-border transfer, whatever the sales deck says.
• Who at the vendor can read your records, under what process, and is that access logged somewhere you can see?
• If a court or a regulator asks the vendor for your data, what is their process, and will you be told before it is handed over?
• Is your data used to train anything, or shared as aggregate figures with third parties? You want a yes or a no, not a paragraph.

Getting out again — the questions vendors hope you skip

You will leave this software eventually. Every business does. The cost of leaving is fixed on the day you sign, not on the day you go, and it is the single most under-asked part of a software purchase.

• Can you export everything yourself, today, without raising a support ticket? Ask them to show you the button.
• In what format? CSV or XLSX of every table beats a folder of PDF reports, which is a picture of your data rather than your data.
• Do exports include attachments — scanned records, prescriptions, mark sheets, invoice files — or only the rows that point at them?
• Does the export include the history: edits, cancellations, who did what and when? An export without the audit trail is a snapshot, not your records.
• How long is your data kept after you stop paying, and how long do you have to pull it out? You want a number of days, in the contract.
• Is there a fee for the export, or for migration help on the way out? Ask now. It is never cheaper to ask later.

What it actually costs — the four pricing traps

The quoted price and the bill are different numbers, and the gap between them is a design choice the vendor made. These are the four shapes that gap usually takes.

• Is the price quoted in AED or INR, and who carries the currency movement at renewal if you are billed in the other one?
• What is included in support, and what is billed by the hour? Get the hourly rate now.
• Are implementation, data migration and training quoted separately? Ask for one number for year one, not a monthly figure.
• What does year two cost? A vendor who will not put year two in writing has told you something about year two.

Invoices, tax and the paperwork that gets audited

• Does it produce an invoice your accountant accepts without re-typing it — your registration number on it, the tax breakup correct, and a sequential number that cannot be reused?
• Can it issue a credit note or a proper cancellation, or does "delete" simply remove the row and leave a hole in the series?
• If structured e-invoicing applies to you now or soon, will the vendor support it, by when, and at what extra cost? Ask for the date.
• Does your existing invoice numbering series survive a migration, or do you restart mid-year and have to explain the break?
• Can a non-technical person correct a mistake at 7pm, and does the correction leave a visible trace rather than rewriting history?

The people: support, language and the 9pm problem

• In which languages can your staff get support? Not the sales conversation — the 9pm "the printer will not print the bill" conversation, in the language the person having the problem actually thinks in.
• Is support a chat widget, a ticket queue, an email address or a phone number, and which of those has a human behind it outside office hours?
• What response time will they commit to in writing, and what happens when they miss it? A vendor with no published response time is not disqualified. A vendor who invents one on the call is.
• Who trains your staff, on site or on a call, how many sessions are included, and what does the next one cost?
• Will they put you on the phone with a customer like you? A vendor with no reference in your sector may simply be new. A vendor who names one and then will not connect you has answered a different question.

Continuity: what happens on a bad day

• What happens at your front desk when the internet drops? Is there an offline mode, or a documented paper fallback that your staff have actually rehearsed?
• Where does the vendor publish outages, and can you see the history rather than a green tick that has never been red?
• What is the recovery plan if the vendor loses a database, and when did they last test a restore? "We take backups" and "we have restored from backup" are different sentences.
• If the vendor goes out of business, what happens to your installation? Is there a source escrow, an on-premise option, or at least an export in a format another vendor can read?
• How often do they ship changes, and can you decline an update during your busiest month?

Now ask us the same questions

A buyer's checklist published by a vendor is only worth reading if the vendor is prepared to be measured by it. So, without waiting to be asked: we publish no response-time commitment, because we have not measured one we would be willing to defend in front of a customer who is angry. Of our five products, one has been live longest, one runs in production at a single clinic that has asked us not to publish its name, and the others are in development or early access. That is a smaller story than most sales decks tell.

If another vendor's answers to the questions above sound considerably better than that, the correct response is not to feel reassured. It is to ask them to show you the evidence — the contract clause, the export button, the year-two price, the reference customer's phone number.