Introduction

Balqalam automates the operational core of a school — admissions, classrooms, attendance, grading, fees, messaging — so staff spend less time on paperwork and more on teaching. It is Arabic-first, starts from the data a school already has, and the code stays open for audit — every contribution is attributed.

What it does

• School operations. Multi-tenant SaaS — one platform serves many schools. Each school gets its own subdomain, branding, roles, and data isolation.
• Bilingual by default. Arabic-first with full RTL support; English LTR mirror. UI labels and dynamic content both translate on demand.
• AI-augmented. Document intelligence for admissions, bank receipts, and (planned) exams, library, and onboarding.
• Open source. SSPL-1.0. Self-hostable today, managed SaaS for schools that prefer not to.

Architecture

Where to start

For stakeholders

• Pilot — MENA-10 free pilot cohort (current open offer)
• GTM — three-phase go-to-market strategy
• Marketing — positioning and content
• Sales — B2B outreach playbook
• Leads — pipeline operations and discovery script
• Proposal — Free Pilot and Paid Conversion templates
• Case study — King Fahad first draft + framework
• Business model — pricing tiers and revenue
• Pitch — investor narrative
• Shared economy — contributor revenue sharing
• Incubators — MSAR + Orange Corners applications
• Competitors — landscape + MENA battle-card

Conventions

• Single-language storage. One lang field per row; generic field names (title, body, name); on-demand translation cached in Translation.
• schoolId scoping on every query. Missing schoolId = data leak across tenants.
• Semantic HTML. No hardcoded text-* / font-* classes; logical CSS properties so RTL works without overrides — see Style guide.

For full constraints and the role model see PRD.