Compliance tracking — Qatar
A lapsed QCDD certificate blocks your Commercial Registration renewal — business-stopping, not a fine. Late lease registration compounds monthly: the surcharge on the 1% fee escalates +25% → +50% → +75% → +100% with each month overdue (Law 4/2008 art. 20) — and an unregistered lease locks you out of the rental dispute committee entirely. Automating those clocks costs less than one missed deadline, and saves roughly an admin-day a month of manual tracking. Indicative figures; every portfolio differs.
Qatar's deadlines are different from Australia's — and sharper. Missing them doesn't just risk a fine; it can block your Commercial Registration renewal or lock you out of the rental dispute committee entirely. PMFriend tracks them the same way it tracks everything: the deadline finds you before the penalty does.
This page covers Qatar. Running an Australian portfolio? See Compliance tracking →.
The two automatic lease timers
These need nothing from you — recording the lease IS the reminder.
Lease registration — 30 days from lease start
Law 4/2008 (art. 20) requires every lease to be registered with the Municipality's Lease Contract Registration Office within 30 days of the lease start (the fee is 1% of the annual rent, paid by the lessor). This matters more than it sounds, twice over: the late surcharge escalates every month you're overdue — +25%, then +50%, +75%, and +100% of the fee — and an unregistered lease means the Rental Dispute Settlement Committee will refuse to hear your case, so there's no legal recourse against a tenant until it's registered.
The moment you record a new lease in PMFriend, a 30-day countdown task appears in your compliance register. Register the lease, mark it done — that task never nags again (the next lease brings its own countdown).
Deposit return — 14 days from lease end
When a tenant vacates, standard practice (and most lease contracts) is to return the security deposit — with an itemized statement of any deductions — within 14 days. (What the law itself fixes is the cap: a residential deposit may not exceed two months' rent, art. 7.) When you record a fixed-term lease, PMFriend schedules the deposit-return task for 14 days after the lease end date. It sits quietly in "upcoming" until the move-out approaches, then surfaces on your radar.
Even a tenancy you import after it ended gets the timer, as long as the 14-day window is still open.
The building deadlines (recurring)
| What | How often | Why it bites |
|---|---|---|
| Civil Defence (QCDD) fire certificate | Every year | Requires an active maintenance contract with a QCDD-approved fire company. A lapsed certificate blocks your Commercial Registration renewal |
| Elevator preventive maintenance | Every year | Landlord obligation in tower stock |
| Central AC / chiller service | Every year | Book before May — a chiller failing in a Doha summer is an emergency, not a maintenance item |
| Kahramaa electrical / transformer room | Every 2 years | Landlord responsibility |
| Insurance renewal | Every year | Universal practice |
| Routine inspections | Every 6 months | Per your lease terms |
Each becomes a task per building with due dates and reminders, exactly like the Australian register. Complete one (or let the linked work order complete it — the contractor's note carries over as evidence) and next year's task schedules itself.
Amounts in riyals
Set your agency's display currency to QAR in Settings (admin only) and every amount in the app — rents, work-order costs, dashboards, and the worker's job page — renders in riyals instead of dollars. It's a display setting: no values are converted, only the label changes.
Your own Aqarat license
Compliance isn't only about the buildings — the agency itself must hold a license from the Real Estate Regulatory Authority (Aqarat) to operate. Record your license number and expiry in Settings, and PMFriend shows a warning across the app from 60 days before it lapses. The deadline that would quietly shut the whole agency down gets the same treatment as every other deadline: it finds you first.
Where does our data live? (PDPPL)
The question your procurement team will ask has a prepared answer: a transfer-impact summary covering what data PMFriend processes, in which regions, under what safeguards, and how that maps to Qatar's Personal Data Privacy Protection Law (Law 13/2016) — including the per-feature list of exactly what is and isn't sent to the AI. Read the full summary →
The rest of the Qatar toolkit
- Tenants report by WhatsApp → — your WhatsApp number becomes the AI-read intake.
- Dispute packs for the RDSC → — when a matter goes to the Rental Dispute Settlement Committee.
Workers who need the job explained?
The other half of the Qatar story: many technicians understand some English but not enough to safely follow written instructions — so tasks get re-explained or hand-translated at reception. Instead: when you dispatch a job, the worker's job page has a one-tap Translate button — Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali, Nepali, Tagalog, Sinhala, Arabic. Worker task translation →
Disclaimer: compliance rules in PMFriend are operational reminders based on typical Qatar jurisdiction defaults, not legal advice. You remain responsible for interpreting the rules that apply to your buildings.