GarageBuddy — The UAE's Garage Operating System
GarageBuddy is a two-sided platform I founded for the UAE's garage industry: garagebuddy.ae is the software a garage runs its business on, and garagebuddyuae.com is the marketplace where that garage's own customers find it. One side gives a workshop the invoicing, approvals and compliance tooling it needs day to day; the other sends car owners to the garages already running it — two products built around the same industry, live now.
Both live now — garagebuddy.ae for the garage, garagebuddyuae.com for its customers.
Why I built it
My day job is Odoo — implementing ERP for mid-sized and larger businesses across the UAE, and automotive service groups are one of the industries I build for directly: job cards, digital inspections, warranty and insurance billing, gate pass paperwork, the workshop workflow I describe on Odoo for automotive & vehicle service. GarageBuddy takes that same experience and turns it into a standalone product, built to run whether or not a garage is on Odoo underneath, and paired with a marketplace so the garages using it have somewhere their own customers can find them.
GarageBuddy.ae — the software a garage runs on
The sharpest reason to look at this now is compliance: the UAE's e-invoicing mandate doesn't wait for a workshop to finish digitising at its own pace. As garagebuddy.ae puts it plainly on its own homepage: "Your garage runs on paper. The FTA deadline doesn't care." It's built to be FTA-compliant from the invoice up, with standard invoicing and e-invoicing handled natively rather than bolted on once the deadline lands, and it runs bilingually — Arabic and English, with a working Arabic version at garagebuddy.ae/ar/ — rather than English with a translated label on top.
FTA-compliant invoicing & e-invoicing
Standard invoicing and e-invoicing built to FTA requirements from the start, so a garage's paperwork is compliance-ready rather than retrofitted at the deadline.
WhatsApp approvals & payments
Customers approve estimates and pay through WhatsApp, so a job isn't stuck waiting on a phone call or someone walking back in to sign.
Insurance & fleet workflows
Handles insurance-billed jobs and fleet accounts alongside everyday retail work, instead of a single-car workflow stretched to cover both.
Arabic and English
A working Arabic version alongside English, so both a garage's staff and its paperwork can run in the language the business actually uses.
GarageBuddyUAE.com — where car owners find a garage
The other half of the model is the marketplace: garagebuddyuae.com is where a car owner goes to find one of the garages running the software above, rather than picking a workshop at random and hoping the quote holds up once the car's on the lift.
AI diagnosis
Describe the problem and get an initial AI-driven read on what's likely wrong before ever booking a slot.
Transparent, upfront pricing
See pricing before committing to a job, not after the car is already up on the lift.
Verified price protection
Pricing that's verified up front, protecting a car owner from a quote that quietly inflates once the job is already underway.
Compare verified garages & book
Compare verified workshops against each other and book directly, instead of calling around for quotes one by one.
Why this matters if you're evaluating me
I'm Muhammad Salman Ali Khan, an Odoo Techno-Functional Consultant in Dubai and Head of Projects at Techbot Information Technology LLC, with 10+ years and 100+ Odoo implementations behind me, and I spoke at Odoo Experience 2025 in Brussels. Most of what's on this site is Odoo work I've delivered for clients. GarageBuddy is different — a platform I own end to end, built out of the same automotive workflows I already implement for clients rather than guessed at from outside the industry.
Related reading
Run a garage, or need to find one?
GarageBuddy has a side built for you — both products are live now. Try the one that fits, or talk to me if you'd rather see how I think about process first.