The inspector asked for the Arabic invoice
Building materials trading · under ten staff · 2026
Engagement overview
Engagement details are anonymised and composited to protect client confidentiality.
The situation
A building-materials trader whose accountant invoiced from an English template, because that is what the suppliers and most customers read. One price list lived in a spreadsheet; a different one lived in the WhatsApp catalogue; the shelf label was whichever was printed last. Translating some fourteen hundred product names into Arabic had been "on the list" for two years, and the accountant would not change the invoicing template because the auditor was used to it.
What was breaking
A Commercial Control inspector asked for the invoice of the last sale and the price displayed on the shelf. The invoice was in English, the shelf price differed from the WhatsApp price, and no product information was available in Arabic. Three counts in one visit. The Ministry of Commerce recorded more than two thousand violations of this kind in a single two-month inspection drive in 2026, and a price-display violation can close the shop on the spot.
Source Consumer Protection Law 39 of 2014; MOCI inspection drive 2026
What we built
An Arabic layer over the existing invoicing. The accountant exports or prints exactly as before; a small service picks up the export, produces a numbered bilingual invoice with the fields consumer protection requires, and archives it. One master price list feeds the printed shelf labels, the WhatsApp catalogue and the invoice, so a price is changed once. The product names were translated in a first pass by a model working from trade terminology, then approved by the owner, once.
English only · no Arabic product information
- Item 1 · Cement, 50 kg bagqty 20 · KWD 31.000
- Item 2 · Steel rebar, 12 mmqty 40 · KWD 58.400
- Item 3 · Tile adhesive, 25 kgqty 10 · KWD 17.500
What stayed untouched
The accounting software and the accountant's workflow; the auditor's reports; the bank; the WhatsApp catalogue as the customers know it.
Where AI did the work
One job: the first-pass Arabic translation of fourteen hundred product names and descriptions, for a person to approve. Everything else is templates and integration, and we did not call it anything else.
AI did one job
Where the data lives
Invoices and the price list are stored and processed in the Gulf; the engagement document names the provider and region.
What changed
The next inspection found an Arabic invoice, a matching shelf price and Arabic product information for every item. The accountant did not change a single habit. The owner changes a price in one place.
All case studies Next case The order lived in WhatsApp, and the invoice did not exist →
- a matching shelf price
- did not change a single habit
- changes a price in one place
Get this as a package
The system in this case study is available as a fixed-scope package, with a stated delivery time and an indicative price range.