Why the cashier screen speaks Urdu, Bengali and Pashto

A large part of the retail and hospitality workforce in Saudi Arabia is more comfortable reading Urdu, Bengali or Pashto than English. Most point-of-sale systems offer Arabic and English, and stop there.

Wameed offers cashier interfaces inUrdu, Bengali and Pashto as well. Here is the reasoning, which is operational rather than sentimental.

The error argument

A cashier working in a language they read slowly makes a predictable set of mistakes:

• Modifier errors. Selecting the wrong option from a list of similar-looking words, which is how the wrong item reaches the kitchen.
• Hesitation at the till. Half a second per screen, forty times an hour, at peak.
• Avoidance. A cashier who is unsure of a function avoids it. If they cannot confidently read the refund screen, they call a supervisor for every return — which is slower for everyone and hides the real problem.
• Errors they cannot self-correct. A mistake made and not understood becomes a void, a refund, or a customer complaint.

None of these are about capability. They are about reading speed under pressure, and they disappear when the interface is in the language the person reads fastest.

What we saw

Shops that switched their evening staff to an Urdu interface reported fewer voids and noticeably less hesitation on the modifier screens within the first weeks. It is not a subtle effect, and it costs nothing to try — the setting is per user.

The training argument

Training someone on a system in their second or third language takes longer and holds less. The same twenty-minute session in the language they think in produces a cashier who is independent by the second shift rather than the second week.

Seetraining staff.

What is translated, and what is not

Translated: the cashier interface — buttons, functions, prompts, error messages, the shift close, the return flow. Everything the person at the till reads.

Not translated: your product names. Those stay as you entered them, in Arabic or English, because they are what appears on the customer's invoice and on your shelf labels. A cashier reading an Arabic product name with an Urdu interface is the normal case, and it works — recognising a product name is a different task from reading an instruction.

The customer's invoice is always in Arabic and English as required, regardless of what language the cashier's screen is in. The interface language is an internal setting; the tax document is not.

How it is set

Per user, not per terminal. Each staff member's account carries their preferred language, so one terminal serves an Arabic-reading morning cashier and an Urdu-reading evening one without anyone changing a setting.

Where this sits in the market

Per our August 2026 audit, cashier languages beyond Arabic and English are present in Wameed and Odoo, and not in Foodics, NCR, Oracle, Rewaa, Marn, Revel, Geidea, Sapaad or Hala.

We think this is an oversight in the market rather than a deliberate decision by those vendors. The workforce is what it is, and building for the person who will actually use the software eight hours a day is not a feature — it is the job.

If you employ staff who read these languages

Three practical steps:

1. Ask each person which language they read most comfortably. Ask rather than assume; some people prefer English and it is not always who you would guess.
2. Set their account to it. Thirty seconds.
3. Train in that language, and put the printed one-pager under the till in it too.

Then look at your void and refund numbers a month later. If they have not moved, nothing is lost. In our experience they move.

The broader point

Software is used by people, and the people using a point of sale are usually not the people who bought it. A system that is comfortable for an owner in a meeting and awkward for a cashier at 9pm on a Thursday is optimised for the wrong moment.

That principle shapes a lot of what we build, and this is one of the clearer examples of it.

See thelocalisation feature.