If you run a car rental office in Riyadh, Jeddah or Dammam, you already have one system you can't skip: every rental contract has to be issued through Tajeer, the unified electronic contract platform of the Transport General Authority (TGA). It has been rolled out in phases since July 2021, and in 2025 the rules were tightened so that issuing a contract outside the designated system can bring a fine.
So when owners search for a "car rental management system", the real question is narrower than it sounds. Tajeer handles the contract. What handles everything around it?
This article is about that gap: the jobs a small or mid-size rental office still runs on WhatsApp, paper and Excel even though the contract itself is digital, and how to close them without buying an expensive fleet suite you'll only use a fifth of. I work at Mythex, an AI app builder made in Dubai, and I use it in the short build at the end. Weigh that part accordingly; the first half applies whichever tool you choose.
What Tajeer does, and what it doesn't try to do
Tajeer's job is the legal record of the rental: who rented which car, when, on what terms, under a standard contract the authority recognises. To use it, the office must be licensed by the TGA for car rental and have an active account on the Naql portal. TGA reported over 1.6 million unified e-contracts in the second quarter of 2026 alone, so this is not a niche system. It's how the whole sector works now.
What it isn't is the operating system of your business. In most offices the following still live somewhere else:
- Reservations before the contract exists. A customer books a Camry for Thursday on WhatsApp. Is a Camry actually free on Thursday? Who promised it?
- Availability by car. Which plates are out, which are due back today, which are at the workshop, which have registration (Istimara) or insurance renewing this month.
- Deposits and what happened to them. How much was held, on which card or in cash, what was deducted for fuel, km, damage or fines, and when the rest was returned.
- Fines and tolls after return. Violations often show up days or weeks after the car is back. Someone has to match each one to the right rental and the right customer and decide whether to recover it.
- Damage history per car. Photos at handover and return, so a scratch is assigned to the right rental and not argued about later.
- Corporate accounts. Companies renting five cars a month for staff want one monthly statement, not five receipts.
- Tax invoices. ZATCA e-invoicing (Fatoora) is being extended wave by wave. The 25th wave, announced in July 2026, covers taxpayers whose VAT-taxable revenue passed SAR 187,500 in any year from 2022 to 2025, with a deadline of 1 February 2027 according to EY and KPMG. That pulls in most small rental offices.
None of that is a criticism of Tajeer. It's simply not what it's for.
The three ways offices close the gap
1. Excel plus WhatsApp. Free, flexible, and how most offices with under 20 cars run. It breaks in predictable places: two people promise the same car, a deposit is returned before a fine arrives, nobody can say which car made the most money last quarter.
2. A packaged rental suite. International products (HQ Rental Software, Rent Centric, Navotar and others) and regional vendors offer reservations, fleet, maintenance and billing in one place. Before you sign, ask each vendor three Saudi-specific questions: how their system works alongside Tajeer (do staff retype contract details, or is there a link?), whether their invoices are ZATCA-compliant or need a separate e-invoicing tool, and whether the interface and printouts work properly in Arabic. Then ask for the price per car or per user in year two, not just year one.
3. A small custom system built around Tajeer. Keep Tajeer for contracts and a ZATCA-compliant tool for invoices, and build only the missing middle: reservations, fleet status, deposits, fines and damage records. For an office with 10 to 80 cars this is often the best fit, because it matches how you actually work and costs little to run.
Write the data model before you choose anything
Whichever route you take, write these six lists on one page first. It makes comparing vendors, and your own build, much faster:
- Cars: plate, make/model, category, colour, odometer, status (available, reserved, rented, workshop), Istimara expiry, insurance expiry, next service km.
- Customers: name in Arabic and English, mobile, ID type (national ID, Iqama, passport for visitors), licence expiry, company (if corporate). Store only what you need.
- Reservations: customer, category or specific car, pickup and return date/time, branch, delivery address, status (requested, confirmed, converted, cancelled).
- Rentals: reservation, car, Tajeer contract number, km and fuel out/in, handover photos, return photos, daily rate, extras.
- Deposits: rental, amount, method, held date, deductions with reasons, released date.
- Fines and charges: rental, date/time, type, amount, recovered from customer (yes/no), note.
The key field is the Tajeer contract number on every rental. It's what lets you line up your own records with the official contract when there's a dispute.
A short build: the middle layer in one afternoon
Here's how I'd build that middle layer in Mythex. You describe the app in plain language (Arabic or English), and it builds it, gives it a Postgres database and publishes it to a link your staff can open on a phone.
Prompt 1: the base
Build an internal app for a car rental office in Riyadh. Arabic first, right-to-left, with an English toggle. Tables: cars, customers, reservations, rentals, deposits and fines, using the fields I list below. Every rental must have a Tajeer contract number field.
(Then paste your six lists.)
Prompt 2: availability
Make a fleet board: one row per car, one column per day for the next 14 days, coloured by status. Block a car automatically when its Istimara or insurance expires or a service is due within 500 km. Don't allow two confirmed reservations for the same car on overlapping dates.
Prompt 3: handover on a phone
Add a phone-friendly handover screen for counter staff: pick the rental, record km and fuel, take up to 8 photos of the car, and save. Do the same on return and show the out and in photos side by side.
Prompt 4: deposits and fines
When a car is returned, keep the deposit open for 21 days. Show a list of deposits due for release this week. Let staff add a fine or charge to a closed rental by plate and date; the app should find the rental that had that car at that time.
Prompt 5: corporate statements
For corporate customers, add a monthly statement: all rentals in the month with dates, car, days, extras and charges, exportable to PDF and Excel in Arabic and English.
Test each step with fake data: two cars, three customers, an overlapping booking that should be refused, a fine that arrives after return. When something's wrong, say so in a sentence ("deposits for corporate customers aren't held", "show the plate in Arabic letters too") and it changes the app.
What the office gets
- One place for the fleet: who has which car, what's due back, what's off the road and why.
- Members-only access: staff sign in; nothing is public unless you make a page public (for example a reservation request form for your website).
- Your own domain, such as
ops.yourrental.sa, if you want one. - Arabic done properly: right-to-left tables, forms and PDFs, because Mythex builds in Arabic natively.
- Phone apps if you want them: on Pro the same app can be packaged for Android and iPhone (TestFlight), though for counter and yard staff a mobile web app is usually enough.
Honest limits
- It does not replace Tajeer. Contracts are still issued in Tajeer. Your app stores the contract number; it doesn't issue contracts, and you shouldn't ask customers to sign extra documents on top of the official contract. Check the TGA's current rules on this.
- It is not a tax-invoicing system. Issue invoices from a ZATCA-compliant solution and store the invoice number on the rental.
- Data location. Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law has rules on transferring personal data outside the Kingdom, and Mythex hosts app databases outside Saudi Arabia. Store as little ID data as you can, check the transfer rules for your case, and if a contract requires in-Kingdom hosting, export the code and run it on a Saudi cloud region.
- You own the rules. "Hold deposits for 21 days" is your policy, not the software's. A vague rule produces a vague feature.
For teams
If several people work the counter, the yard and the accounts, put the app in a shared team workspace rather than one person's account, so it stays when a staff member leaves. On Mythex that's the Business plan (from $50/month): shared workspace, roles (admin, editor, viewer), members-only apps and Google Workspace sign-in. More rental examples are on the car rental page, and plans on the pricing page.
How to decide
- Under 10 cars, one branch: a well-kept spreadsheet with a reservations tab and a deposits tab is fine. Add the Tajeer contract number column today.
- 10 to 80 cars, corporate customers, recurring disputes about fines or damage: build or buy the middle layer. Start with the fleet board and deposits; they pay back fastest.
- Several branches, 100+ cars, telematics: a packaged suite with an implementation partner, checked against the three Saudi questions above.
Whichever you choose, track one number for the next three months: money paid out for fines and damage that you couldn't recover from the renter. If it drops, the system is working.
