How Qashio Made a Case for Spend Management in the UAE

In August 2022, less than a year after Qashio launched in Dubai, Entrepreneur Middle East reported that the company was serving more than 100 customers in the UAE. In the same interview, co-founder Armin Moradi explained the problem the team had chosen to sell against. Companies could see what employees had spent after receipts and records made their way to finance. He wanted them to have more control over the purchase itself and see it sooner. For a young company selling to finance teams, that distinction gave the buyer a concrete process to examine. Entrepreneur Middle East’s interview with the Qashio founders

Moradi and fellow co-founder Jonathan Lau launched Qashio in November 2021, according to the interview. The early coverage gives a launch date, a reported customer milestone and Moradi’s account of the offer. It gives no breakdown of how those customers arrived, what they paid or how long they stayed. The better question for a UAE sales team is what made the proposition concrete enough to test with a finance buyer, and how a team can tell when that test has become repeatable. Qashio’s account of its founding

A purchase finance could see before month-end

The early pitch joined two things the buyer could evaluate together. Qashio offered corporate cards and software through which the company could manage those cards. Moradi described controls such as setting budgets, restricting categories and suspending a card. In his account, the purpose was to let a business give employees spending authority within limits it set itself. The relevance for a finance director depended on where that authority already sat and where the existing process created work. Moradi’s description of the early offer

Consider a hypothetical Dubai operator with several restaurant sites. A manager needs to buy replacement supplies ahead of an evening shift. If they use petty cash, someone needs to replenish it and match the purchase to the right restaurant later. If they pay personally, someone needs to approve and reimburse them. A sales conversation can start with that particular purchase. Ask who knows what the manager is permitted to buy, who sees the cost when it happens, and what arrives in finance at the end of the week. Each answer gives the buyer a way to judge whether a change would help.

That walk through a real purchase also reveals who has to agree. Finance can define the limit and check the accounting record. Operations knows when a purchase cannot wait and what happens when the approved route fails. The person doing the reconciliation can tell whether a receipt with a date and value is enough or whether the buyer also needs a project code, a site reference or an explanation. A demonstration to one audience may leave those handoffs unresolved. A seller who surfaces them early can propose a trial the other teams will recognise.

The same product story may need a different starting point in another company. A business with few purchases but a slow reimbursement cycle could care more about employees waiting to get their money back. A multi-site operator might care about how often the office loses track of the cost centre. The practical distinction is where to start measuring and who should own the result. If a buyer can point to a recurring purchase and explain what goes wrong, the seller has more to work with than a general request for automation.

What a later Dubai customer illustrates

Qashio subsequently published a customer account featuring FITT Meals, a Dubai meal-plan operator. Qashio describes the operator as having used the product to manage petty cash and track daily expenses. It attributes to FITT Meals a saving of 10 hours of accounting time per month and a 20% reduction in monthly miscellaneous spend. The latter is a claim about a spending category. The public account gives neither the original dirham amount nor a breakdown of which purchases were removed, reclassified or reduced. Its value for another buyer is in the workflow it identifies, including receipt collection, petty-cash tracking and notes attached to transactions. Qashio’s FITT Meals case · FITT Meals company information

Those details make a better starting point for discovery than the headline percentages. A buyer can review the last batch of unreconciled transactions and separate missing receipts from coding mistakes and delayed approvals. The first may be a capture problem. The second may reflect how a department or site is mapped. The third can persist even when all the documents are in one place. The seller and buyer can use those distinctions to decide what a trial should change and how to tell whether it did.

FITT Meals’ official Instagram shows one of its branded meal containers. The post illustrates the customer’s business, while the expense workflow is described separately in the case account.

For a company weighing a similar change, the first measure can be the number of purchases that still need manual follow-up at the close of a week. Agree what qualifies as follow-up. A single reminder to an employee and three calls to identify which site made a purchase are different amounts of work. Track both the count and the effort involved. It then becomes possible to see whether the old work disappeared or was passed to store managers, a central approver or the supplier’s support team.

Make the first rollout small enough to inspect

A finance team can run a first rollout with one department, one set of buyers and one type of expense. The scope should include an ordinary purchase and an exception. An ordinary purchase shows whether the employee can complete the flow and whether finance receives the expected information. A declined purchase, missing receipt or absent approver tests whether the operating team can keep working and whether the buyer can trace what happened. Agree on the response and responsibility before staff encounter it on a live shift.

One way to make the sales handoff concrete is to define each step through evidence the next team can use.

A simple illustrative comparison shows why the denominator matters. Suppose a team processed 120 relevant purchases in its baseline month and chased 36 for missing evidence. That is a 30% follow-up rate. It then processed 150 in a trial month and chased 30, a 20% rate. The follow-up burden fell by six purchases and the rate fell by ten percentage points even though activity rose. Before valuing the change, the buyer would still want to see how long each case took and whether the trial handled a comparable mix of purchases. A quiet month of simple expenses can flatter a workflow that struggles when projects are busy.

Implementation time belongs in the same review. Suppose the first account requires extensive help mapping cost centres or training approvers. The seller should log that effort, including work done by a founder. The buyer should record the work on its side. For the next account, use those notes to see whether a checklist, example mapping or short training session covers the same ground. If each new contract requires a different setup, the business can decide how much of that work it can support at the price and service level it offers.

What changes when a partner brings in prospects

Dubai Chambers now lists Qashio in a member offer. The listing describes a corporate spend platform and a package designed for its members. Qashio also describes a separate initiative for Dubai Chambers members in collaboration with Emirates. These pages describe later ways for prospects to encounter an offer. They do not establish how the company reached the customer milestone reported in 2022. Dubai Chambers member listing · Qashio’s description of its initiative

A partner can make the introduction easier by reaching businesses that already know it. The work after the introduction still needs an owner. The partner and seller can agree what qualifies a referral, who follows up and what the prospect was told. If the offer lowers the cost of trying the product, the seller can separately measure whether referred accounts complete setup, run their first purchase and continue using the workflow after the introductory period. A campaign can draw interest even if few prospects are equipped to roll the product out. Those counts should inform different decisions.

Keep partner-sourced leads distinct from accounts that came through founder introductions or direct outreach. Record the sector and the workflow that drove the decision, then compare how much onboarding and support each group needed. A referral programme that finds many small accounts with the same setup can be commercially different from one that finds fewer accounts with extensive approval and integration work. The best measure depends on what the business can deliver repeatedly and what those customers need after signing.

When a founder can hand the sale to someone else

A hundred customers reported within the first year is a milestone in Qashio’s launch story. A commercial leader making a decision today needs a second record alongside a number like that. Which customers have used the product through an ordinary trading period? Which can explain the value in their own records? Which needed special help to get there? Make the unit of measurement explicit. A customer account, a cardholder and a card in active use represent different things. The right count for a sales review may differ from the one a support team needs to plan its workload.

A useful handoff test is to let another salesperson run discovery and ask a separate onboarding colleague to deliver the setup with the materials already in use. Listen for the same buyer problem and see whether the buyer supplies the records needed to evaluate it. Then review the first reconciled purchase and the first exception. If those still depend on the founder stepping in, document what that intervention accomplished. It may reveal a missing question, a decision nobody owns or an account the offer was never designed to serve. Once the team can handle that decision itself, the next UAE account can test the same process again.

The handoff also gives the founders a better basis for deciding when to hire. If prospects stall because finance cannot validate a benefit, another salesperson may reproduce the same stall. If qualified buyers have accepted the workflow and are waiting for someone to guide the setup, capacity is a different problem. Compare the time spent at each stage across several accounts before deciding where to add people.