Darqora

The problem

Many property companies in the UAE and the wider GCC rent out space they do not own. They lease a building, a villa or a camp from an owner, divide it into rooms, and rent those rooms to tenants on monthly or yearly contracts. Every layer carries its own paperwork: the owner lease, the tenant contract, post-dated rent cheques, Emirates ID and passport copies, deposits, grace periods, and the DEWA and other utility bills that have to be paid and tracked.

When all of this lives in spreadsheets, the links between the layers are easy to lose. Which cheque belongs to which contract? Which rooms in a building are empty this month? Has the utility bill for a villa been paid, and by whom? Software built for owners who let whole units does not follow this chain, because it starts from the property, not from the lease the company holds on it.

What we built

Darqora models the chain directly: owner lease, then building, then room, then tenant, then rent contract. Each record links to the ones around it, so a rent cheque can be traced to its contract, its room, its building and the lease that building sits under.

Around that chain, Darqora covers the day-to-day work of a Gulf rental business:

• Rent cheques recorded with a photo of each cheque.
• Tenant records with Emirates ID and passport details.
• DEWA and utility bills recorded and tracked.
• Deposits and grace periods on each contract, monthly or yearly.
• Transactions with an optional approval step, and the company’s bank accounts.
• Reports with export to CSV, Excel and PDF.
• A dashboard and tasks for the team’s daily follow-ups.
• Staff access by building, so each person sees only the buildings they look after.
• Employee and salary records for the company’s own staff.

Each company sees Darqora under its own name, logo and address. There is an Arabic version, and Darqora can be installed as an app, as a progressive web app (PWA).

How it runs

Darqora is built on PHP 8.3 and MariaDB. Each company gets its own copy, which GoProgs sets up, hosts and updates. When a company starts, we move its existing records over from Excel, so the team begins with its own buildings, tenants and contracts already in place rather than an empty system.

GoProgs hosts its own products on a Docker-based Linux server that we manage, behind Caddy, with HTTPS certificates from Let’s Encrypt issued and renewed automatically. Updates are rolled out by us, so companies using Darqora do not install or maintain anything themselves.

New companies start with a demo, which they book through the Darqora site.

What it taught us

Building Darqora shaped practices we bring to client projects:

• Model the business chain before the screens. Getting lease, building, room, tenant and contract right made every later feature easier. On client work, we agree on the data model before designing pages.
• Keep the evidence next to the record. A cheque photo attached to the cheque entry saves a search through folders later. We look for the documents people already keep and give them a place in the system.
• Make approvals optional. Some companies want every transaction approved; others do not. We build controls that can be switched on rather than forced on everyone.
• Export to the formats people already use. Accountants and owners want CSV, Excel or PDF, so reports leave the system in those formats.
• Treat migration as part of the product. Moving data in from Excel is a planned step, not something left to the customer.
• Scope access to responsibility. Permissions by building match how staff are actually assigned.

Where it’s going

Darqora is live and offered through demos on its own site, in English and Arabic. Work continues within the scope the product already covers: the lease-to-contract chain, Gulf rent practice such as cheques and DEWA bills, access control by building, and white-label setup for each company.