# Serdar Dilshad — full content > AI engineer, ERP & business automation in Kurdistan ## Identity Canonical name: **Serdar Dilshad** (pronounced SER-dar DEEL-shaad) Given name: Serdar · Family name: Dilshad (Kurdish surname meaning 'happy heart') Native scripts: سەردار دلشاد (Arabic) · سەردار دلشاد (Kurdish, Bahdini) Handle / lowercase form: serdar.dilshad PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED ONLINE AS: **Sardar Bircini** (Anglicized form, used through May 2026). The current and legacy names refer to the same person and work. Social handles: @sardarbircini on GitHub, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Medium and Instagram. Email: sardarbircini@gmail.com. Legacy Latin transliterations that resolve to this entity: Sardar Bircini, Sardar Birjini, Sardar Birceni. Legacy native scripts: سردار بيرجيني (Arabic) · سەردار بیرجینی (Kurdish, Bahdini). Serdar Dilshad, AI engineer, software engineer and motion graphic designer in Duhok, Kurdistan. Custom business software, SaaS, ERP and POS systems, AI integrations, automation, product explainers and social ad videos. URL: https://serdardilshad.dev Email: sardarbircini@gmail.com WhatsApp: +964 750 322 4696 Phone: +964 750 322 4696 Based in: Duhok, Kurdistan Region Languages: English, Arabic, Kurdish (Bahdini and Sorani) Areas served: Kurdistan Region, Duhok, Hawler, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Zakho, Halabja Pricing: project-specific written proposals. Scope, implementation phases, provider usage, training, maintenance and support are agreed before work. ## About Serdar Dilshad is an AI engineer, software engineer and motion graphic designer based in Duhok, Kurdistan Region, offering integrated ERP, AI automation, Claude and ChatGPT integrations, MCP servers, marketing automation, motion graphics, and multilingual web platforms (English / Arabic / Kurdish — Bahdini and Sorani) for businesses in Kurdistan. 17 systems are currently running in production — a mix of multi-tenant products and custom systems built for a single business — serving 29 businesses across the Kurdistan Region: 14 in Duhok, 11 in Hawler, and 4 in Slemani. The products written up as case studies: motelsystem (multi-tenant hotel platform with local-government-compliant reporting, live at tourism.krd, 33+ weekly waves shipped), SalonSystem (multi-tenant all-in-one SaaS for salons and beauty businesses, live at krd.beauty), DentalSystem (multi-tenant practice-management SaaS for dental clinics, live at smile.krd, with security-audited per-clinic data isolation), Obaida Beauty (custom single-tenant business system that seeded the SalonSystem product), and eMed Store (online medical retail with WhatsApp-driven order flow and dual-currency). One further platform is in active development: a custom management system paired with a trilingual (EN/AR/KU) public platform for a major tourism destination in Kurdistan. ## Products and custom services Serdar Dilshad operates named software products and takes custom client projects. Published product case studies: - smile.krd — dental clinic operating system (https://smile.krd) - SalonSystem — salon, spa and beauty business platform (https://krd.beauty) - MotelSystem — hotel and hospitality platform (https://tourism.krd) Custom projects are scoped and quoted separately: AI engineering and automation, ERP, POS and custom business systems, Claude and ChatGPT integrations, MCP servers, payment integrations, education systems, marketing automation, customer messaging, motion graphics, AI consulting, and SEO / AEO. The product case studies document what has shipped, including business workflows, multilingual interfaces and local currency handling. The services directory describes available project scope. New service offers and integrations are not presented as features already delivered in every product. Each proposal identifies the included modules, supported platforms, implementation phases, training, support and ongoing provider costs. ## AI engineering and business capabilities in Kurdistan Serdar Dilshad is an AI engineer and software engineer in Duhok, serving businesses in Duhok, Hawler/Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Zakho and Halabja. Custom projects can connect business operations, AI assistants, marketing and customer communication in a shared workflow. The modules and integrations included are defined in the written project scope. - [AI engineering and automation](https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/ai-automation): AI agents, autonomous workflows, document extraction, booking, follow-ups and automated customer-message replies. Actions that need staff authorization can use approval steps, audit logs and human handover. - [Claude, ChatGPT and MCP development](https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/ai-integrations-mcp): AI apps, connectors, actions and Model Context Protocol servers that connect approved tools and business data. Platform access and permissions are checked for each integration. - [ERP development and business management](https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/erp-business-systems): custom inventory, purchasing, sales, accounting, HR, payroll, CRM, reporting, multi-branch and multi-warehouse workflows, with AI features selected for the business's actual needs. - [Custom software and apps](https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/custom-systems): web platforms, dashboards, customer portals, booking systems and integrated operations software. - [Meta and TikTok marketing automation](https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/marketing-automation): workflows for Instagram, Facebook and TikTok campaigns, lead capture, CRM follow-ups, reporting and customer replies, subject to the supported APIs and account permissions. - [Motion graphics](https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/motion-graphics): product explainers, animated campaign assets, social media creative and launch videos with agreed formats and revision scope. - [POS systems](https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/pos-systems): retail, restaurant, pharmacy and front-desk workflows, with IQD/USD handling, stock control and reporting as required. - [Payment integrations](https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/payment-integrations): local payment gateways, multi-wallet checkout, webhooks and reconciliation scoped to the merchant's accounts. - [Education systems](https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/university-systems): student records, admissions, fees, transcripts and learning-management integrations. - [AI consulting](https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/ai-consulting): readiness reviews, practical AI use-case selection, data preparation, evaluation and rollout planning. - [SEO and AI search discovery](https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/ai-seo): crawlable content, multilingual service pages, structured data and measurement of relevant search queries. Kurdish-language AI and software support covers Bahdini (Badini/Behdini) and Sorani as separate language targets, alongside Arabic and English. Projects can include retrieval from a business's own information, evaluation with real Kurdish customer messages, RTL interfaces and staff handover rather than relying on translation alone. Projects are scoped around operating needs and budget. Phased delivery can prioritize useful modules first; implementation, provider usage, training, maintenance and support are agreed in the proposal. Documented case studies below describe shipped systems; a listed service does not mean every existing product contains every integration. ## Traction 17 systems are currently running in production — a mix of multi-tenant products and custom systems built for a single business — serving 29 businesses across the Kurdistan Region: 14 in Duhok, 11 in Hawler, and 4 in Slemani. ## Services ### Custom software & apps URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/custom-systems Pricing: Scoped per project Summary: Shape the idea, choose the essential features and build a first release people can use. Bring disconnected tools, repetitive tasks and daily operations into a system that fits your team. Detail: Yes. Tell me who the product is for and what you want it to help them do. You don’t need a technical specification. We can decide together whether you need a website, an app, a business system or a simpler solution. #### Can I contact you with just an idea? Yes. Tell me who the product is for and what you want it to help them do. You don’t need a technical specification. We can decide together whether you need a website, an app, a business system or a simpler solution. #### Understand the work We talk about your users, your workflow and what a useful first version should do. #### Agree, design, build We agree on scope and price before building. You see the design and working progress along the way. #### Launch with a plan We plan deployment, handover and support together. Ownership, hosting and maintenance are agreed in writing. #### How much will my project cost? The price depends on the features, integrations, data migration and support you need. After a free initial conversation, I propose a written scope and price. If one of my existing products fits, we can discuss that instead of a custom build. What you get: - Full ownership — no vendor lock-in, no monthly per-seat fees - Multilingual EN/AR/KU at the database level, not as a bolt-on - Kurdistan compliance baked in (local-government reporting, dual-currency) - Mobile-first, fast on slow networks Examples: - tourism.krd - krd.beauty - smile.krd Relevant business situations: - Your booking, inventory or customer workflow does not fit a ready-made product. - You need a multilingual customer platform connected to the team's internal records. Documented project evidence: - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/motelsystem — MotelSystem connects room bookings, walk-ins, deposits, receipts and local-government reporting with an EN/AR/KU public booking site. - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/obaida-beauty — Obaida Beauty documents discovery sessions and a single-business system shaped around that team's workflow and multilingual customer experience. - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/emed-store — eMed Store documents a trilingual product catalogue and a WhatsApp order flow adapted to cash on delivery and IQD/USD accounting. Acceptance checks to agree before delivery: - Walk through the agreed customer and staff journeys in every required language. - Check record permissions, migration samples and a complete data export. - Agree source ownership, deployment, handover and support responsibilities in writing. ### ERP & Business Management Systems URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/erp-business-systems Pricing: Scoped per project Summary: Custom modular ERP for complex business operations in Kurdistan: finance, stock, purchasing, HR, CRM and service delivery, with scoped AI assistants, customer replies and marketing workflows connected to the same records and permissions. Detail: Custom modular ERP for complex business operations in Kurdistan: finance, stock, purchasing, HR, CRM and service delivery, with scoped AI assistants, customer replies and marketing workflows connected to the same records and permissions. #### The moment you need one Almost every company here hits the same wall in the same order. First the stock count stops matching the shelf. Then two branches give a customer two different prices. Then payroll takes three days because the hours live in one place and the salaries live in another. Then nobody can answer "did we make money last month" without a week of work. That is not a discipline problem. That is a systems problem, and it is the problem ERP exists to solve. The catch is that real ERP — SAP, Oracle, Dynamics — is priced and scoped for companies an order of magnitude larger than most companies in Kurdistan, and the local resellers of those products will quote you accordingly. The alternative most businesses land on is a stack of disconnected apps plus a very large spreadsheet. There is a third option: build the modules you actually need, connect them properly, and skip the eighty percent you will never open. #### Modules I build ### Inventory and warehouse Multi-warehouse and multi-branch stock, transfers with approval, batch and expiry tracking, serial numbers where they matter, stock-take with variance reporting, reorder points, and landed-cost handling so your margin figures survive contact with shipping and customs. ### Purchasing and suppliers Purchase requisitions and orders, supplier records and price lists, goods-received notes matched against orders, supplier ageing, and three-way matching between order, receipt and invoice. ### Sales and customers Quotations, orders, delivery notes, invoicing, customer ageing, credit limits, price lists per customer type, and a CRM pipeline that a salesperson will actually update because it takes ten seconds. ### Accounting A real double-entry general ledger — not a report generated from a sales table. Chart of accounts, journals, accounts receivable and payable, bank reconciliation, fixed assets and depreciation, cost centres per branch, and trial balance, P&L and balance sheet that tie out. Built around Kurdistan's actual tax position: 15% flat corporate income tax on net income, a 30 June filing deadline, no VAT and no sales tax. Your books come out in a shape your accountant can file from, rather than one they have to rebuild. ### HR and payroll Employee records and contracts, leave and attendance, shift scheduling, and payroll that handles the local reality: the 1,000,000 IQD monthly tax-free allowance, income tax withholding above it, and 12% employer / 5% employee social security. Payslips in Kurdish, Arabic or English. ### Multi-currency The same discipline as the POS work: prices held in IQD or USD, an owner-controlled house rate with a change log, and the rate snapshotted onto every transaction so historical reports stay stable. Reports available in either currency, with the basis stated on the report. ### Four working languages — including both Kurdish dialects Every module runs in Bahdini, Sorani, Arabic and English, and each user picks their own at login. A warehouse clerk in Duhok works in Bahdini while the accountant in Hawler works in Sorani and the owner reads reports in English — same database, same records, one system. Bahdini and Sorani are treated as two separate languages, not one checkbox. Most vendors here ship "Kurdish" meaning Sorani only, which is no use to a company operating in Duhok, Zakho or Akre. Invoices, payslips, purchase orders and reports all render correctly in whichever is chosen, with right-to-left layout built in rather than patched on. ### Reporting and dashboards Branch-by-branch P&L, margin by product and by customer, stock valuation, cash position, ageing reports, and an owner dashboard that answers "how are we doing" in one screen instead of one week. ### AI, where it actually pays for itself I build AI automation and AI agents as well as the systems themselves — which means the AI sits on top of your real ledger rather than guessing from an export. The use cases that consistently earn their cost in an ERP: - Invoice and document extraction into accounts payable — supplier invoices, delivery notes and receipts read automatically and matched three ways against order and receipt. This is the most reliable return in the entire category, and almost nobody here is doing it yet - Demand forecasting and reorder planning — seasonality, Ramadan and Newroz peaks, and supplier lead times factored into what you should be holding - Ask-your-data reporting — "what was our margin on this supplier's products across all branches this quarter" answered in plain Kurdish, Arabic or English instead of built by hand - Exception detection — duplicate payments, prices that drifted from the price list, a customer quietly running past their credit limit, stock adjustments that need explaining - Customer and supplier messaging — quotes, order confirmations and payment reminders drafted in the right language and tone, sent on WhatsApp, logged against the record And the honest counterpart, which is also in my AI consulting work: a good deal of what gets sold as "AI for ERP" is a report with a chatbot in front of it. I will tell you which of the above is worth your money for your business and which is not — including when the answer is none of them yet. #### Connect the whole operation, one workflow at a time I can build a complex ERP around the way your business actually operates, with the modules chosen during scoping: finance, inventory, procurement, HR and payroll, CRM, project or service delivery, customer communication and marketing. Each selected module shares the relevant customer, product, order and staff records, with access controlled by role and branch. These are capabilities available for a scoped build; the proposal identifies exactly which ones your system will include. A connected workflow can start with an enquiry from an approved social channel, record it in CRM, prepare a quote, check stock, schedule delivery or a service team, issue an invoice and return the order status to the customer. Your staff work from the same history instead of retyping the same details into several apps. ### Claude, ChatGPT and live business data Claude can connect through custom MCP tools, and ChatGPT through supported app or API integrations. An owner can ask about overdue invoices, a salesperson can check an order, and an authorised team member can prepare an action using current business records. Read access and write actions are scoped separately, and each action follows the system's permissions and approval rules. ### Scheduled agents and customer replies Agents can prepare a daily branch summary, flag low stock, queue follow-ups or draft supplier enquiries on a schedule or after a business event. Auto-replies can answer agreed questions about products, appointments and order status from permitted live records. Unclear requests, complaints and exceptions go to a named person; commitments such as refunds or discounts follow the approvals agreed for that workflow. ### Meta and TikTok marketing operations Where the account and approved APIs support it, the ERP can connect Meta advertising, Instagram and Facebook enquiries, and TikTok campaign reporting to CRM and sales records. Scope can include lead capture, campaign preparation, performance reports and customer follow-ups. Platform account access and API approval are prerequisites; publishing campaigns, changing budgets or spending money requires the owner's approval and agreed limits. The first phase starts with the workflows taking the most staff time or causing the most missed orders. We map the records and permissions, deliver a working process, check it with your team, then add the next modules. A larger system can grow from that shared foundation without rebuilding customer and stock records for every department. The proposal separates the build price from hosting, AI-model usage, messaging-provider charges and advertising spend. Reusing shared records and choosing useful modules first avoids duplicate setup work; usage budgets and approval limits keep ongoing costs visible. The cost and coverage depend on the workflows, integrations, data and support you choose. #### Sold as modules, not as a monolith Start with the modules that solve your most urgent problems, then add the next one when it earns its place. Modules share a database and permission model so later phases can reuse the foundation. Each addition has its own agreed scope, price and timeline. A typical sequence: 1. Inventory + purchasing — stops the stock bleeding, usually pays for itself first 2. Sales + invoicing — one price list, one document trail 3. Accounting — the ledger the first two feed 4. HR + payroll — once the headcount makes it worth automating #### Where this fits, and where it doesn't Good fit: distributors and wholesalers, multi-branch retail, food and beverage groups, manufacturing, construction and contracting with per-project costing, medical suppliers, and organizations with complex workflows across departments. Delivery is phased around the modules, migration and team capacity agreed during scoping. Bad fit — I will tell you: if you are a single shop with one till, you want POS, not ERP. If your process is genuinely standard and you have the budget, an established product like Odoo may serve you better than anything bespoke, and I will say so — including which local partner to talk to. Custom is worth paying for when your workflow is your advantage, not when it is just undocumented. #### Getting off what you have now Nobody starts from zero. The migration work is part of the job: extracting from Excel, from an old Access or desktop system, or from a product whose vendor has disappeared — cleaning the master data, mapping the chart of accounts, and running the old and new system in parallel until the numbers agree for a full month before anyone switches off. #### How pricing works There is no price list, and you should be suspicious of any ERP vendor who gives you one. The same "ERP" can mean two modules for a 12-person distributor or seven modules and a two-year data migration for a 200-person group. What I will tell you openly is what actually drives the number: The main drivers - How many modules — this is the biggest single factor, and it is why I sell them one at a time - How many branches, warehouses and users - Migration — how much data has to come across, and how clean it is. This is routinely underestimated and is often the largest line item - Integrations — payment wallets, existing systems, hardware, anything that has to talk to something else - How unusual your workflow is — standard processes are fast; a process that is genuinely your competitive advantage takes longer to model properly - Multi-currency — full dual-currency with reconciliation is real engineering, not a settings toggle What keeps it down - Starting with two modules instead of seven - Clean, exportable existing data - One person on your side empowered to answer questions quickly — this affects timeline more than anything in the code How you find out your number: a free scoping call, then a written proposal with fixed scope and a fixed price per phase. You see the breakdown before you commit, not after. If you decide to stop after phase one, you own everything built in phase one. I will also tell you when the answer is *don't buy this from me*. If your process is genuinely standard and you have the budget, an established product may serve you better than anything bespoke — and I will say which one and who implements it locally. Book a free 15-minute call → Relevant business situations: - Stock, purchasing, sales, staff and finance keep different copies of the same records. - Branches need shared records, permissions and reports while working in their own languages. Documented project evidence: - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/salonsystem — SalonSystem combines bookings, staff, customer history, inventory and reporting under one login, demonstrating connected operational modules with shared records. - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/dentalsystem — DentalSystem documents clinic scheduling, billing, stock, staff permissions and financial reporting, with Bahdini and Sorani separately selectable alongside Arabic and English. Acceptance checks to agree before delivery: - Follow one agreed transaction across the selected modules and compare the resulting records. - Reconcile migrated balances and stock totals with the existing system before switching. - Test branch permissions, approval steps, audit history and required report languages. ### POS Systems URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/pos-systems Pricing: Scoped per project Summary: Point-of-sale for shops, restaurants, cafés, pharmacies and supermarkets — dual-currency dinar/USD, offline-tolerant, in Bahdini, Sorani, Arabic and English, and connected to the payment wallets people here actually use. Detail: Point-of-sale for shops, restaurants, cafés, pharmacies and supermarkets — dual-currency dinar/USD, offline-tolerant, in Bahdini, Sorani, Arabic and English, and connected to the payment wallets people here actually use. #### The problem with imported POS software Most point-of-sale software sold in Kurdistan was designed somewhere else and translated afterwards. It shows up in three ways, every time: It assumes one currency. Your menu is priced in USD, your customer pays in IQD, your change comes back in a mix of both, and your gateway settles in IQD. Imported POS software treats this as an edge case. Here it is Tuesday. It assumes the internet works. A front desk or a checkout counter cannot stop selling because the line dropped. A POS built for Kurdistan has to take the sale locally and reconcile when the connection returns. It assumes Latin script and left-to-right layout. Kurdish and Arabic get bolted on as an afterthought, so receipts break, product names truncate, and the staff end up working in a language they read slowly. And when a vendor does say "Kurdish", they almost always mean *one* Kurdish — usually Sorani — which does not help a shop in Duhok or Zakho at all. I build the other kind. #### Kurdish means both Bahdini and Sorani This is worth stating plainly, because it is the thing almost every vendor gets wrong. Bahdini and Sorani are not interchangeable. A staff member in Duhok, Zakho, Amedi or Akre reads Bahdini. A staff member in Hawler or Sulaymaniyah reads Sorani. Handing either one the other dialect and calling it "Kurdish support" means your cashier is working in a language they have to slow down to read — on a screen they use several hundred times a day. In the systems I build, Bahdini and Sorani are separate, complete languages, not one label with one translation behind it: - Every interface string exists in both, written by someone who speaks Bahdini natively - Receipts, invoices and printed documents render correctly in both - The staff member picks their own dialect at login — a Duhok branch and a Hawler branch of the same business can each work in their own - Product and customer names are stored so that both dialects, Arabic and English coexist in one record without corrupting each other - Right-to-left layout is built in from the start, not patched on afterwards Plus Arabic and English, for a total of four working languages in one system. This is not a plan — it is running. smile.krd, my dental clinic platform, is live in production in exactly this configuration: English, Arabic, Bahdini and Sorani, with each clinic selecting its own dialect and every label in the system editable, right down to the receipt. #### What I build A POS is not one screen. It is a checkout flow, an inventory ledger, a payments layer, and a reporting layer that all have to agree with each other at the end of the day. I build all four. ### Checkout - Barcode and keyboard-first entry — the till should be usable without a mouse - Fast product search in Kurdish, Arabic and English - Split tender: part cash, part wallet, part card, on one bill - Held and parked sales, returns, and voids with a reason code - Receipt printing to thermal printers, including a second accounting copy where the business needs one - Shift open/close with a cash-drawer count and a variance report ### Dual currency, done properly This is the single thing imported systems get wrong, so it is worth spelling out. In the systems I build: - Products can be priced in IQD or USD, per product - A house exchange rate is set by the owner, with a change log - The rate is snapshotted onto every transaction — so a report run three months later still reconciles, instead of silently re-pricing history - A single bill can be tendered in mixed currency and change given in either - Gateway settlement in IQD reconciles cleanly against a USD-denominated ledger ### Inventory that the checkout actually updates - Stock decremented at the moment of sale, not by a nightly batch - Multi-branch and multi-warehouse, with transfers between them - Batch and expiry tracking — non-negotiable for pharmacies and food - Low-stock and near-expiry alerts - Purchase orders and supplier records - Stock-take mode with variance reporting ### Payments Wired to the rails people here actually use — FIB, ZainCash, FastPay, AsiaPay/AsiaHawala and Qi Card — plus cash and card. See Payment & bank integrations for how each one works. ### Reporting - Z-report and X-report per shift - Sales by product, category, staff member, branch, hour of day - Margin by product, once cost prices are loaded - Books structured for a 15% corporate income tax filing and a 30 June deadline - Export to Excel, because your accountant will ask for it #### Built for these businesses Restaurants and cafés — table map, table-side ordering on a phone or tablet, kitchen tickets, course firing, split bills, service charge, multilingual menus. Supermarkets and grocery — high-speed scanning, weighed items, price checks, promotions, supplier and purchase-order flow. Pharmacies — batch and expiry control, generic-name search across Kurdish, Arabic and English, supplier records, controlled-item flags. Retail and fashion — variants (size, colour), barcode label printing, multi-branch stock visibility. Salons, clinics and service businesses — appointment-linked checkout, staff commission, customer history. This is what SalonSystem already does in production. Dental and medical clinics — treatments and retail products in one checkout, instalment plans, per-line-item insurance coverage, thermal receipt printing, and an end-of-day cash drawer audit that reconciles. This is running today in smile.krd, live in clinics across Duhok, Hawler and Sulaymaniyah. Hotels and guesthouses — front-desk terminal, deposit capture, dual receipt printing, folio posting. This is what MotelSystem already does in production at tourism.krd. #### AI inside the till, not bolted onto it I also build AI automation and AI assistants — and when the same person builds your POS and your AI, the AI gets to see the data. That is the whole difference between AI that works and AI that demos well. What that actually looks like in a POS: - Reorder suggestions that learn your patterns — not a fixed minimum-stock number, but "you will run out of this on Thursday, and last Ramadan you sold four times as much" - Supplier invoice extraction — photograph the delivery invoice, and the lines are read, matched against the purchase order, and posted. This is the single highest-return AI feature in retail and the one most businesses here still do by hand - Natural-language reporting — the owner asks "which branch lost money last month and why" in Kurdish, on their phone, and gets an answer instead of an export - Anomaly flags — a till with unusual void or discount patterns, stock shrinkage that does not match sales, a price that was changed at 11pm - An AI assistant on WhatsApp for your customers — order status, opening hours, product availability, in their own language, wired to live stock rather than to a static FAQ ### Why Kurdish AI is the hard part General AI models handle English well, Arabic acceptably, and Kurdish badly — Bahdini worst of all, because there is far less written Bahdini for them to have learned from. Anyone who tells you they will "just add AI in Kurdish" has not tried it. Making it work takes deliberate engineering: careful prompt and retrieval design, your own business vocabulary supplied as ground truth, evaluation against real messages from your actual customers rather than a demo script, and honest fallback to a human when confidence is low. I do this work because I need it for my own products, and because Bahdini is my own language. #### What this is built on Next.js and TypeScript on the front, PostgreSQL on the back, deployed to the edge so a checkout screen in Duhok is not waiting on a server in Frankfurt. Multi-tenant installations use row-level security, so one business can never see another's data. Your data is exportable in full, at any time, with no lock-in. #### How pricing works I don't publish a price list, because a POS for a single till and a POS for a six-branch supermarket group are not the same product, and any number I printed would be wrong for one of them. What I do publish is exactly what moves the price, so you can estimate your own scope before you ever speak to me: Pushes it down - One branch, one till - Standard checkout, inventory and reporting with no unusual workflow - Single currency - One payment method, or cash only - Clean product data you can hand over in a spreadsheet Pushes it up - Each additional branch or till - Kitchen operations — table map, table-side ordering, kitchen tickets, course firing - Batch and expiry control (pharmacies, food) - Full dual-currency with reconciliation - Each additional payment wallet integrated - Migration from an existing system, especially one with messy or partial data - Hardware integration beyond standard thermal printers and scanners - A workflow specific to your business that no product models What you get before committing: a free scoping call, then a written proposal with a fixed scope and a fixed price. Not an hourly estimate that grows. If the scope changes mid-project, we agree the change and its cost in writing first. Monthly running costs — hosting and services — are quoted separately and openly, and they are small relative to the build. #### What I will tell you honestly If you run a single till, sell fewer than a few dozen lines, and are happy with what you have — you do not need me. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits your business, I will say so and tell you which one. I have walked away from projects before and I will do it again. Where custom is worth it: multi-branch, dual currency at real volume, an unusual workflow that no product models, or an integration nobody else will build for you. Book a free 15-minute call → Relevant business situations: - Your checkout needs IQD and USD, clear receipts and an end-of-day cash check. - Staff need Bahdini, Sorani, Arabic or English on the till and printed documents. Documented project evidence: - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/offline-first-supermarket-pos — A four-lane supermarket POS in Duhok that keeps selling with no internet: each till sells from its own local database and syncs exactly once later, with a tamper-evident chain, and label scales and fingerprint attendance run from the owner's phone. Published as a research paper. - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/dentalsystem — DentalSystem at smile.krd documents a production IQD/USD POS, a transaction-level exchange-rate snapshot, thermal receipts, instalments and cash-drawer reconciliation. Its four-language interface includes Bahdini and Sorani separately. Acceptance checks to agree before delivery: - Test a sale, mixed-currency payment, change, refund and printed receipt on your hardware. - Confirm historical sales keep their recorded exchange rate when the current rate changes. - Reconcile a sample shift and test the agreed behavior during a network interruption. ### AI Automation URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/ai-automation Pricing: Projects from $1,500 Summary: AI agents connected to your business records: customer replies, document processing, bookings and follow-ups in Kurdish, Arabic and English, with clear handover to your team. Detail: I build AI agents and automation pipelines that absorb the work no human in your business actually wants to do. WhatsApp auto-responses tuned to your tone, AI receptionists for hotels and clinics, document extraction (invoices, IDs, receipts), scheduling assistants, and follow-up sequences. Everything is multilingual where it needs to be — including Kurdish. What you get: - Customer replies grounded in your approved information and live records - 24/7 first-response coverage in EN/AR/KU - Scheduled follow-ups with delivery tracking and human handover - Audit log of every AI decision Examples: - WhatsApp AI assistant for a hotel reservations team - Document-extraction pipeline for guest IDs feeding the required government report - AI booking confirmer with multilingual SMS follow-up - Sales-lead qualifier that hands warm leads to a human Relevant business situations: - Your team repeatedly answers booking, product or order-status questions in Kurdish, Arabic and English. - Documents and follow-ups move between inboxes and business records by hand. Documented project evidence: - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/salonsystem — SalonSystem documents event-based WhatsApp booking confirmations, day-before reminders and post-visit follow-ups connected to its booking records. Evidence to discuss: For AI replies or document extraction, review a pilot using your approved information, sample documents and the Kurdish dialect your team needs. Acceptance checks to agree before delivery: - Test correct, ambiguous and out-of-scope requests against agreed reference answers. - Confirm permissions, human handover and an activity log using sample business records. - Agree usage budgets, failure alerts and the way your team pauses the workflow. ### Claude MCP & ChatGPT Integrations URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/ai-integrations-mcp Pricing: Scoped per project Summary: Connect Claude and ChatGPT to your business tools, ERP and customer data. Custom MCP servers, supported apps and actions, and scheduled AI workflows built around the work your team needs done. Detail: Connect Claude and ChatGPT to your business tools, ERP and customer data. Custom MCP servers, supported apps and actions, and scheduled AI workflows built around the work your team needs done. #### Put AI to work with your business tools I build integrations that let an assistant retrieve an order, check available stock, prepare a customer summary or draft a follow-up using your business data. The starting point is a defined workflow and the systems your team already uses. The offer includes custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for Claude and compatible clients, plus ChatGPT apps, connectors or custom GPT actions where the selected product and account support them. The integration route is confirmed during scoping. #### ERP, CRM and documents in one workflow An agreed workflow can combine ERP orders and stock, CRM customer history, approved documents and external APIs. For example: find an unpaid invoice, prepare a reminder using the customer's language, then send it for approval or through an authorized channel. I define which records the assistant can read and which actions it can take. Business rules, staff permissions and customer-data boundaries remain part of the system, including when an assistant calls several tools in sequence. #### Scheduled work with clear limits Scheduled agents can prepare daily reports, flag low stock, organize incoming requests and run agreed follow-up routines. Each workflow has a trigger, permitted actions, an owner and a way to stop it. Actions that change records, contact customers or spend money use the approval rules we agree. Delivery includes activity logs, failure alerts and human handover for exceptions, with retries designed to avoid duplicate actions. #### What you receive An agreed integration plan, the custom server or integration code, tool definitions, configured workflows, realistic test cases and a handover guide. The scope names the connected systems, languages, access requirements and acceptance checks before implementation. We validate on a limited workflow before extending access. Hosting, credential management, monitoring and ongoing support responsibilities are agreed alongside the build. #### Build costs and running costs The quote depends on the number of systems and tools, API availability, authentication, data cleanup, approval rules and workflow complexity. An existing supported API usually costs less to integrate than a system requiring a new data interface. AI usage, platform subscriptions, hosting and maintenance are separate operating costs. I estimate them from expected usage and define limits during scoping so you can start with a useful workflow and expand deliberately. Relevant business situations: - Your team wants Claude or ChatGPT to retrieve current ERP, CRM or document information. - You need scheduled assistant workflows with defined tools, approvals and access limits. Documented project evidence: - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/dentalsystem — Since October 2026 a smile.krd clinic owner can add the clinic to Claude or ChatGPT as a custom connector (MCP over OAuth 2.1): live figures read from the clinic database, bookings, services, products and website images written back, WhatsApp reminders drafted, and new online bookings pushed to ChatGPT as they happen. Every money, stock, cancellation or website change asks the owner first. Evidence to discuss: Ask for a working Claude MCP or ChatGPT demo in the chosen client, with the actual authentication method, connected system and agreed read/write tools for your workflow. Acceptance checks to agree before delivery: - Demonstrate the agreed tools in Claude, ChatGPT or the selected compatible client. - Test permitted and denied records, write approvals and duplicate-action prevention. - Review tool logs, credential handling, recovery steps and operating-cost limits. ### Meta & TikTok Marketing Automation URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/marketing-automation Pricing: Scoped per project Summary: Bring Facebook, Instagram and TikTok campaigns, leads and customer follow-ups into your business system. API-based tools, agreed budget controls and ERP/CRM reporting for the channels your accounts support. Detail: Bring Facebook, Instagram and TikTok campaigns, leads and customer follow-ups into your business system. API-based tools, agreed budget controls and ERP/CRM reporting for the channels your accounts support. #### Campaign work connected to your operations I build API-based campaign tools for Meta, including Facebook and Instagram, and TikTok where the required business accounts and permissions are available. The scope can cover campaign preparation, approved changes, scheduled reporting and operational alerts. Budget limits, who approves launch and spend changes, and which actions may run automatically are agreed before implementation. Campaign management and the business's ad spend are separate parts of the engagement. #### From an ad response to a customer record Supported lead forms and approved data sources can feed your CRM or ERP, with duplicate checks, source labels, assignment to the right staff member and agreed follow-up steps. A request should carry its campaign context into the customer record. Where the platform, permissions and consent support it, conversion events can connect completed bookings or sales to campaign reporting. We agree which events to send and keep unnecessary customer data out of the integration. #### Messaging that knows when to hand over I can connect authorized messaging APIs to approved replies, booking questions, stock checks and lead qualification. The scope names each supported channel and account; ad access alone does not establish messaging access. Replies can use your approved knowledge and current ERP/CRM data, with language support agreed for the audience. Questions outside the agreed rules, complaints and sensitive requests go to a staff member. Messaging windows and platform rules shape the workflow. #### What you receive and how it is validated A defined campaign and lead workflow, account integrations, budget approval controls, source tracking, reporting views and a handover guide. We confirm API permissions, account eligibility and available events before committing to platform-specific features. Validation follows a lead from capture through staff handover to its agreed business outcome, and checks that budget changes require the correct approval. Reporting distinguishes platform-reported conversions from sales recorded in your system. #### Scope and operating costs Cost depends on the number of ad accounts, channels, workflows and integrations, the quality of customer data, and the reporting required. Start with the channels and follow-ups your team can actually use. Ad spend, creative production, messaging charges, AI usage, hosting and ongoing support are identified separately in the proposal. Performance is measured against agreed business goals; reach, sales and return depend on the offer, audience, budget and campaign execution. Relevant business situations: - Meta or TikTok leads need to reach CRM with campaign source, assignment and follow-up intact. - Your team needs approved campaign changes, budget controls and reporting linked to actual bookings or sales. Documented project evidence: - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/salonsystem — SalonSystem documents WhatsApp reminders and post-visit follow-ups attached to booking records, demonstrating customer follow-up workflows. Evidence to discuss: For Facebook, Instagram or TikTok integrations, review account eligibility and API permissions, then a permitted test lead and campaign workflow. Ad-platform access and messaging access are checked separately. Acceptance checks to agree before delivery: - Track a test lead from its approved source to CRM assignment and human follow-up. - Confirm spend changes and campaign launch follow the agreed approval and budget rules. - Distinguish platform-reported conversions from sales confirmed in your business records. ### Motion Graphics & Product Explainers URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/motion-graphics Pricing: Scoped per project Summary: Branded motion graphics, software explainers and social ad assets that show what your product does. Agreed scripts, storyboards, revisions and delivery formats for your website and campaigns. Detail: Branded motion graphics, software explainers and social ad assets that show what your product does. Agreed scripts, storyboards, revisions and delivery formats for your website and campaigns. #### Show the product clearly I offer branded motion graphics for product launches, software explainers, onboarding and social campaigns. The brief defines the audience, the message and the action you want a viewer to take. Deliverables can include animated brand elements, interface demonstrations, captioned short videos and variations for different campaign messages. Each asset is scoped around the channels and product features you need to explain. #### Script, storyboard and agreed revisions We agree the script and a scene-by-scene storyboard before full animation. Your existing brand, product screens and approved claims provide the source material, with narration and language versions included when scoped. The proposal defines review stages, revision rounds and who signs off each stage. Script or product changes after approval are scoped separately so the delivery schedule and production cost stay clear. #### Assets for the website and the campaign Delivery formats are agreed for each destination: vertical 9:16 for short-form placements, square 1:1 or landscape 16:9 where needed, with resolution, duration, captions and platform-safe text placement specified. I supply the agreed exports and versions, with editable project files and licensed components covered explicitly in the scope. Website assets can be prepared with file size and loading performance in mind. #### Connected to the product you actually sell For ERP, booking tools and customer portals, an explainer can walk through the actual interface and workflow using demonstration data. We confirm product names, prices and available features against approved product or ERP records before release. When combined with marketing automation, creative versions can be organized by campaign and offer for reporting. The proposal defines any data-driven updates; changes to stock, prices or features do not silently change an approved video. #### How production is priced Cost depends on duration, scene count, animation complexity, supplied brand materials, narration, languages, aspect-ratio variants and revision rounds. A short interface walkthrough and a fully animated launch film need different production scopes. The proposal separates production, any licensed music or voice work, source-file handover and future updates. Ad spend and campaign management are separate services, and the delivery plan lists what you receive and when approvals are needed. Relevant business situations: - Your software or service needs a clear animated explanation using its actual product screens. - A launch or social campaign needs branded video variants, captions and agreed language versions. Evidence to discuss: Ask for a relevant motion-graphics portfolio clip or scoped sample, plus a storyboard and delivery specification for your brief. Acceptance checks to agree before delivery: - Approve the script, actual product claims and storyboard before full animation. - Check agreed aspect ratios, captions, language versions and platform-safe text placement. - Confirm revision rounds, component licences, final exports and any source-file handover. ### Payment & Bank Integrations URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/payment-integrations Pricing: Scoped per project Summary: FIB, ZainCash, FastPay, AsiaPay and Qi Card wired into your site, shop or system — with the dual-currency and reconciliation work that makes them actually usable in your books. Detail: FIB, ZainCash, FastPay, AsiaPay and Qi Card wired into your site, shop or system — with the dual-currency and reconciliation work that makes them actually usable in your books. #### Why this is its own service Every other payment market in the world has converged on two or three rails. Kurdistan has not, and it is not going to soon — because three of the main wallets are locked to a mobile network. ZainCash rides Zain, AsiaPay rides Asiacell, NassWallet rides Korek. A customer who is on the wrong network simply cannot pay you. That single fact changes the engineering. You do not integrate *a* payment provider here. You integrate several, present them side by side at checkout, and reconcile them into one ledger afterwards. Nobody selling you an imported e-commerce platform will do that work, and almost nobody locally publishes how it is done. So here is how it is done. #### The rails, and what each one actually requires ### FIB The best-documented rail in the market, and the one to start with because it is a bank rather than a telco — no network lock on the customer side. How the flow works: you authenticate with OAuth2 `client_credentials` to get a bearer token, then POST a payment request with the amount, currency, callback URL and description. The response gives you back a payment ID, a base64-encoded QR code, a short human-readable code, and a deep link into the FIB app, plus an expiry timestamp. Your customer pays by scanning the QR, typing the readable code, or tapping the link. You then either poll the status endpoint — which returns `PAID`, `UNPAID` or `DECLINED` — or receive a webhook callback. Unpaid payments can be cancelled; paid ones can be refunded inside a configurable window (the default is seven days). Official SDKs exist for PHP, Laravel, Python, Flutter, Android and iOS, plus a WooCommerce plugin. For Node and TypeScript the widely-used package is community-maintained. The full API is published as a Postman collection, and there is a sandbox separate from the live banking network. The catch: the online gateway settles in IQD only. If you price in USD, that is a reconciliation problem you have to solve deliberately — see below. ### ZainCash Public, genuinely good documentation. OAuth2 `client_credentials` for the token, then a transaction-init call that returns a redirect, with the redirect payload and the webhooks signed as JWTs (HS256) — so you must verify the signature server-side rather than trusting the redirect. There is a UAT sandbox with test wallets. Webhooks are configured after you go live, by a business representative, not self-serve. IQD only. Customer must be on Zain. ### FastPay REST plus a QR-generation API, with iOS and Android SDKs, a Flutter package, a React Native package, and an OpenCart extension. Strongly Kurdistan-branded and widely held locally. IQD only. ### AsiaPay / AsiaHawala Token obtained with an App Key and App Secret, JWT-signed, then `preOrder` to create, `queryOrder` to check and `refund` to reverse, with a redirect plus webhook callback. You will need a Domain URL, App Key, App Secret, Private Key, Merchant Code and App ID from them. IQD only. Customer must be on Asiacell. ### Qi Card Mobile SDKs for Android, iOS, Flutter and React Native, covering cards, the SuperQi wallet and saved tokens, with PCI-compliant card handling. Notably, its payment UI ships with Kurdish alongside Arabic and English — one of the few that does. ### NassWallet Contract-gated. No public developer documentation. Korek customers only. Plan for a longer commercial conversation before any code gets written. ### Your checkout, in your customer's Kurdish The providers give you what they give you. Your checkout — the part your customer reads before deciding to pay — is yours, and it should be in the dialect they actually read: Bahdini for Duhok, Zakho, Amedi and Akre; Sorani for Hawler and Sulaymaniyah. I build both as separate, complete translations, with payment-method names, error messages, confirmation screens and emailed receipts correct in each. An error message in the wrong dialect at the moment someone is handing over money is precisely where you lose the sale. ### Cards and international Visa and Mastercard acceptance is thin and cash-on-delivery still dominates. If you sell outside the region, Stripe handles the international side — that is what runs billing on MotelSystem today. Locally, an Erbil-based aggregator (Rasedi) offers a unified API across most of the above, which is sometimes the right call and sometimes an unnecessary layer. I will tell you which, for your volume. #### The part everyone gets wrong: IQD settlement against USD prices Every local gateway above settles in IQD. A great many businesses in Hawler and Duhok price in USD. That mismatch is where the money quietly goes missing, and it is not solved by a currency dropdown. What has to happen instead: - The house exchange rate is owner-controlled and versioned, with a change log - The rate in force is snapshotted onto the transaction record at the moment of sale — never looked up later - The gateway's IQD settlement amount is stored alongside your USD ledger amount, as two separate fields, not one converted one - Rounding rules are defined once and applied everywhere, because IQD has no practical sub-unit and USD does - Settlement reports reconcile the gateway's IQD payout against your books without a human doing arithmetic Get this wrong and your reports drift a little every month, and you will not notice until year-end. This is the same dual-currency discipline that runs in MotelSystem and eMed Store in production. #### Reconciliation and webhooks — the unglamorous half An integration is not finished when the payment succeeds. It is finished when it survives the payment that *half* succeeded. - Idempotency keys on every create call, so a retry does not double-charge - Webhook signature verification on every inbound callback — never trust a redirect - A polling fallback for when a webhook is silently dropped, because they are - A state machine, not a boolean: pending, paid, expired, cancelled, refunded, disputed - An immutable payment event log, so you can prove what happened three months later - Daily settlement reconciliation against what the provider actually paid out - Retry and dead-letter handling, so a provider's bad afternoon is not your bad afternoon #### Where AI earns its place in payments I build AI automation too, and payments is one of the few areas where it does unglamorous work with a hard return: - Reconciliation matching — matching a provider's settlement payout against dozens of individual transactions, across two currencies, when references are missing or mistyped. This is fuzzy matching that a human does slowly and badly, and it is the single best AI use case in this whole service - Payment-proof reading — customers here routinely send a screenshot of a transfer on WhatsApp. Reading it, extracting the amount and reference, and matching it to an open invoice removes a real daily chore - Anomaly and duplicate detection — the same payment recorded twice, a refund pattern that does not look right, a settlement that came in short - A payment assistant for your customers — answering "did my payment go through" and "which wallets do you accept" in Bahdini, Sorani, Arabic or English, wired to real transaction status Where AI does *not* belong: in the payment path itself. Authorisation, verification and state transitions are deterministic code with tests. AI reads, matches and explains — it never decides whether you got paid. #### What I deliver - Multi-wallet checkout, so the customer picks the rail they are on - Server-side integration with signature verification and idempotency - Webhook endpoints plus polling fallback and a reconciliation job - Dual-currency ledger handling as described above - Sandbox testing before go-live, and a documented go-live checklist - Written technical documentation for your team — you own it, not me - Plugged into whatever you run: a custom system, a POS, WooCommerce, or a Next.js site #### How pricing works Priced by scope, not by a rate card. What moves it: - How many rails — the first one carries most of the setup cost; each additional wallet is cheaper than the first - Whether reconciliation is included — a payment button is a small job; daily settlement reconciliation against your books is the real work - Whether dual-currency handling is needed — if you price in USD and settle in dinar, this is where the effort goes - What it plugs into — a clean modern codebase is fast; an old system with no API is slower - Refunds, partial payments and subscriptions — each adds states to the machine Bundled into a POS or ERP build, it costs meaningfully less than commissioning it standalone, because the ledger work is already being done. You get a fixed-scope, fixed-price written proposal after a free scoping call. #### Honest limits I write the integration. I cannot get you the merchant account — each provider has its own onboarding, its own paperwork and its own commercial terms, and those are between you and them. I will tell you exactly what to ask for and review what they send back, but the contract is yours. I also do not publish other people's fee schedules. Ask each provider directly; the numbers circulating online are stale. Book a free 15-minute call → Relevant business situations: - Your checkout or invoices need a supported payment provider connected to the existing system. - You price in USD, receive IQD or cash on delivery, and need records that reconcile. Documented project evidence: - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/motelsystem — MotelSystem documents deposit capture, separate guest and accounting receipts, and Stripe billing as part of the hotel workflow. - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/emed-store — eMed Store documents cash-on-delivery checkout and separate IQD/USD accounting with daily reconciliation. Evidence to discuss: For a local wallet or another payment rail, ask for a provider-specific sandbox demonstration covering checkout, callbacks and settlement records. Acceptance checks to agree before delivery: - Confirm merchant eligibility, provider access and supported currencies before implementation. - Test successful, failed, repeated and refunded payments in the provider's sandbox. - Verify signed callbacks, transaction history and settlement reconciliation before go-live. ### University & Education Systems URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/university-systems Pricing: Scoped per project Summary: Admissions, registration, grades, transcripts and fees in one system that talks to your Moodle — instead of five disconnected portals and a spreadsheet. Detail: Admissions, registration, grades, transcripts and fees in one system that talks to your Moodle — instead of five disconnected portals and a spreadsheet. #### The state of it Nearly every university and college in Kurdistan runs Moodle for teaching, and almost nothing else joins up. Look at the student portals honestly and the pattern is the same across institutions: the "portal" is a page of links. One link to registration, another to a separate ID system, another to Moodle, another to alumni, another to quality assurance. Each is a different system, with a different login, holding a different copy of the same student. Grades move by spreadsheet. Transcripts are assembled by hand. Fee status lives with the finance office and nowhere a student can see it. The teaching layer got solved a decade ago. The administrative layer did not. That is the gap. #### What a real student information system does One student record, one identity, one source of truth, from application to alumni. ### Admissions and enrolment Application intake, document upload and verification, eligibility screening, offers and acceptances, and enrolment that creates the student record rather than starting a new one. Where a national admissions process feeds you students, the SIS ingests that list instead of retyping it. ### Registration Course catalogue and programme structures, prerequisites enforced automatically, section capacity and waitlists, timetable and clash detection, add/drop windows with an audit trail, and academic-advisor approval built into the flow. ### Grades and academic records Grade entry by instructor with a submission deadline and a lock, moderation and grade-change workflow with a reason and an approver, GPA calculation to your own institution's rules, progression and probation rules applied automatically, resit and retake handling. ### Transcripts and documents Official transcripts generated, not assembled — in Kurdish, Arabic or English, correctly typeset in RTL, with a verification code so an employer or a foreign university can check authenticity without phoning your registrar. Enrolment letters, graduation certificates and degree documents from the same record. ### Fees and finance Fee structures per programme and per cohort, instalment plans, scholarships, discounts and waivers, receipts, outstanding-balance visibility for the student, and a hold that blocks registration when it should. Online payment via the wallets and banks students actually use, with dual-currency handling where fees are set in USD. ### Portals - Student: timetable, grades, transcript, fees, documents, one login - Instructor: class lists, grade entry, attendance, advisees - Registrar and admin: the full record, with a real permission model - Parent (schools): attendance, grades, fee status, announcements ### Moodle integration — not Moodle replacement Your Moodle stays. The SIS becomes the system of record and pushes to it: courses and sections created automatically each term, enrolments synced so nobody manually adds students to a course, and grades pulled back to the official record instead of being re-keyed. Single sign-on so a student has one password. This is the highest-value first project for most institutions, because it removes the largest source of manual work without asking anyone to change how they teach. #### Also built for Private schools — enrolment, attendance, grades, report cards, parent portal, fee collection and reminders. Institutes and training centres — cohort intake, course scheduling, attendance, certification and certificate verification. Language centres and continuing education — placement testing, level progression, short-course billing. #### Bahdini, Sorani, Arabic and English — all four, properly Academic documents are the hardest thing in the world to get right in Kurdish and Arabic, because a transcript is a dense table and right-to-left table layout is where most systems break. Names, numerals, mixed-direction text inside a single cell, and correct rendering in a generated PDF — these are solved in the build, not patched afterwards. And Kurdish here means two languages, not one. A university in Duhok or Zakho works in Bahdini. A university in Hawler or Sulaymaniyah works in Sorani. Most systems ship one and label it "Kurdish", which leaves half the region's institutions reading a dialect that is not theirs — on their own official documents. What that means concretely: - Every interface string exists separately in Bahdini and in Sorani - A student's official transcript prints in the dialect their institution uses, correctly typeset, not transliterated or approximated - A student's name is stored once and renders correctly across all four languages without corruption — which matters enormously when that name appears on a degree certificate - Each user chooses their own language: an instructor can work in Bahdini while an international admissions officer works in English, from the same record - An institution running campuses in more than one city can set the dialect per campus If a vendor cannot tell you which Kurdish their system is in, it is Sorani, and you should ask them what that means for your Duhok campus. #### AI for institutions, used carefully I build AI automation and AI assistants alongside the systems, and education is a place where AI helps enormously in some spots and is actively dangerous in others. Both halves matter. Where it works well: - Admissions document processing — reading and verifying uploaded certificates and transcripts at intake, flagging what needs a human rather than making everyone check everything - A student assistant that knows your rules — answering "am I eligible for this course", "when is add/drop", "what do I owe" from your actual regulations and the student's actual record, in Bahdini, Sorani, Arabic or English, at 2am during registration week when your registrar's office is closed - Early-warning flags — attendance and grade patterns that suggest a student is drifting, surfaced to an advisor while it can still be fixed - Timetable and clash resolution — proposing workable schedules against room, staff and prerequisite constraints - Drafting the repetitive correspondence — enrolment letters, standard responses, announcements in all four languages Where I will refuse: - AI does not grade, and it does not decide admissions or progression. Those are consequential decisions about people's lives, they must be explainable and appealable, and a model's output is neither - AI does not generate anything that appears on an official transcript or certificate - Student records are not sent to a third-party model without an explicit, documented decision by the institution about what leaves your systems and what does not That boundary is part of the AI consulting work: telling you clearly which AI projects to do, and which to refuse — even when a vendor is offering them. #### Built to be handed over Institutions outlive vendors. So: - Your data is yours — full export, documented schema, no hostage-taking - Written technical documentation, not just a user manual - Your IT staff get trained on the system, with the source - Standard, widely-known technology — Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL — so any competent developer can pick it up if I am ever unavailable - Role-based access control and an audit log on every record change, because academic records are legally consequential #### Phasing Nobody replaces a whole institution's systems in one go, and any vendor who proposes it is selling you a crisis. 1. Student record + Moodle sync — one identity, automated enrolment. Biggest relief, smallest risk. 2. Registration + timetabling — the term-start bottleneck 3. Grades + transcripts — the manual work disappears 4. Fees + payments — finance joins the record 5. Admissions — the front door, once the rest is stable Each phase runs live before the next starts. #### How pricing works An institution's SIS is priced by scope, and the range between a private institute and a full public university is genuinely enormous — so a published figure would mislead one of you. What drives it: - Which phases you take, and how many at once. Phase one alone is a fraction of the whole - Student and staff numbers, and how many campuses or faculties - How your academic rules actually work — GPA calculation, progression, resits and grade moderation differ by institution, and these rules are the system - Data migration — how many years of historical records have to come across, from how many disconnected systems, in what condition. On education projects this is usually the largest and most underestimated item - Integrations — Moodle, payments, existing identity systems - Whether documents are legally consequential — verifiable transcripts and degree certificates carry more validation, audit and testing work than internal reports What keeps it down: starting with phase one only, exportable existing data, and one empowered person on your side who can answer academic-policy questions without a committee. What you get: a free scoping call, then a written proposal with fixed scope and fixed price per phase. You commit one phase at a time, each goes live before the next begins, and you own everything delivered in a completed phase whether or not you continue. For institutes, training centres and private schools, the scope — and therefore the cost — is considerably smaller than for a university. Ask. #### Where to start If you run a university, college, institute or private school here and you are not sure whether this is a six-week project or a two-year one, the fastest way to find out is a call. I will tell you which phase would actually help you and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire me. Book a free 15-minute call → Relevant business situations: - Admissions, registration, grades and fees use separate student records and logins. - Your institution needs a student information system that works with its existing Moodle. Evidence to discuss: Ask for a relevant system walkthrough or pilot with sample student records, your academic rules and the institution's actual Moodle integration requirements. Acceptance checks to agree before delivery: - Test one student journey from registration to grade, transcript and fee record. - Validate Moodle enrolment sync, permissions and recovery from a failed sync. - Approve GPA rules, transcript rendering and migration reconciliation with your registrar. ### Hire a senior full-stack & infrastructure engineer URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/nextjs-supabase-development Pricing: Scoped per project Summary: One engineer for the whole stack: Next.js and React apps, Supabase or PostgreSQL, your own servers set up from bare metal, and security designed in from day one — layered defences, least-privilege access, encrypted traffic and full audit trails. Real Arabic and Kurdish right-to-left, AI where it earns its place. Fixed scope, tests that fail first, and you own every line. Detail: One engineer for the whole stack: Next.js and React apps, Supabase or PostgreSQL, your own servers set up from bare metal, and security designed in from day one — layered defences, least-privilege access, encrypted traffic and full audit trails. Real Arabic and Kurdish right-to-left, AI where it earns its place. Fixed scope, tests that fail first, and you own every line. #### What you get One senior-minded developer who owns the whole thing — database, server, interface, deployment — and talks to you directly. No account manager, no hand-offs. - Next.js (App Router) and React 19, TypeScript end to end - Supabase: Postgres, row-level security, auth, storage, realtime — or plain PostgreSQL when that fits better - Multi-tenant SaaS: one codebase, many businesses, each on its own subdomain or domain - Arabic and Kurdish (Bahdini and Sorani) as first-class right-to-left languages, not a translated afterthought - Offline-first clients for places where the internet drops - Claude and ChatGPT connectors (MCP) when you want your users to work through an assistant - Also Python, Go, Rust and C++ where speed, systems work or tooling need them #### Servers and security, built in - Your own servers, set up from bare metal: hardened Linux on Hetzner or similar, behind a protected edge, with automatic backups you can actually restore from - Security in layers, so one mistake never opens the door: least-privilege accounts, row-level security in the database, encrypted traffic everywhere, signed updates and a full audit trail - Every security job comes with a written threat model, a red-team report and a runbook — not just patches - Each client's data stays in its own place; nothing leaks between tenants #### What I have shipped - smile.krd — dental clinic platform: bookings, patients, payments, website builder, Claude/ChatGPT connector - krd.beauty — salon and beauty business system: bookings, POS, finance - tourism.krd — hotel and motel management platform with multilingual guest booking - An offline-first supermarket POS and ERP — roughly 310,000 lines, 1,243 commits, 736 test files — written up as a research paper #### How I work - A written scope and a fixed price before any code - Every bug fix ships with a test that was watched failing first - A change counts as deployed only when the running site reports the new version - Screens are tested by hand on a real phone, in every language, before I call them done - You own the repository and every line; nothing is locked to me - Duhok time (UTC+3): overlaps the Gulf all day and most of the European working day #### How pricing works Scoped per project. The drivers are the number of distinct user roles, how much money and stock logic is involved, how many languages, and whether it must work offline. You get a fixed scope and a fixed price in writing after a free 15-minute call. Relevant business situations: - You need one developer to build or rescue a Next.js and Supabase product end to end, remotely. - Your product must work properly in Arabic or Kurdish right-to-left, or keep working when the connection drops. Documented project evidence: - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/dentalsystem — smile.krd is a multi-tenant Next.js and Supabase platform: each clinic gets its own site, admin, bookings and payments, in English, Arabic and Kurdish. - https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/offline-first-supermarket-pos — The supermarket POS shows the testing discipline: property-based tests for idempotency and replay, real-database concurrency races and end-to-end checks — 736 test files. Acceptance checks to agree before delivery: - Agree the written scope, fixed price and acceptance tests before work starts. - Receive the repository, deployment access and a working build you can run without me. ### AI Consulting & Audit URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/ai-consulting Pricing: Audits from $750 Summary: I evaluate where AI fits in your business, where it doesn't, and what it would actually cost. You get a written plan you can act on — even without me. Detail: Most AI consulting in the region is sales talk. Mine isn't. I do a structured 1–2 week audit of your business — workflows, data, team — and produce a written plan with costs, prioritized opportunities, and the projects you should specifically NOT do. Honest assessments only. What you get: - Clear go/no-go on every AI use case proposed - Realistic cost ranges (build, run, maintain) - Risk register for AI deployment - Implementation roadmap you can hand to any team Examples: - AI-readiness audit for a 50-employee logistics company - Tooling-cost evaluation for a hospitality group - Hire vs. build vs. buy decision report - AI policy and risk document for an SMB Relevant business situations: - You need to choose useful AI projects before committing to a large build. - Your team needs a clear comparison of automation options, data readiness and running costs. Evidence to discuss: Ask for a scoped audit sample or agreed pilot: workflow map, model evaluation, data requirements and build/run estimates relevant to your business. Acceptance checks to agree before delivery: - Receive a prioritized plan with a clear decision and rationale for each proposed use case. - Review language evaluation, data access, owner responsibilities and a realistic pilot plan. - Separate build, subscriptions, model usage, maintenance and expected operating costs. ### AI SEO & AEO URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services/ai-seo Pricing: Engagements from $1,200 Summary: Make your services and project evidence easier for search and AI engines to understand. Multilingual pages, structured data, crawlable content and measurement of search visibility and assistant citations. Detail: I improve the information search engines and AI assistants can retrieve about your business: useful service pages, real project evidence, consistent identity, multilingual content, crawlable links and structured data. Search Console and a citation measurement harness help track visibility for relevant buyer questions in Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini. The work prioritizes clear answers and independent references, with results measured over time. What you get: - Clear service pages and project evidence for search and AI discovery - Localized pages, crawlable service links, llms.txt and an accurate sitemap - Schema.org markup that AI assistants parse correctly (Person, Service, FAQ, LocalBusiness) - Weekly AEO measurement report — exact prompts, exact citations, week-over-week trend Examples: - AEO baseline + 8-phase optimization plan for motelsystem (multi-tenant hotel platform, Duhok) - AI SEO build for smile.krd (dental clinic, Duhok) — llms.txt, schema, Playwright measurement harness - Trilingual citation-tracking for a service business across ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity / Gemini - Citation audit and prioritized content plan for Kurdish-language buyer searches Relevant business situations: - Buyers cannot find a clear answer about your services, location or project experience. - Your multilingual content and business identity need to be consistent across search and AI retrieval. Evidence to discuss: Ask for a crawl and content audit, documented buyer questions and dated search or citation measurements. Review the measurement method alongside any claim about rankings or assistant recommendations. Acceptance checks to agree before delivery: - Verify crawl access, canonical pages, language alternatives and sitemap coverage. - Tie service claims to accurate project pages and genuine third-party references. - Compare dated search visibility and assistant citations for an agreed set of buyer questions. ## Case studies ### Built for the mountains: a full supermarket ERP that keeps selling when the power and internet go URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/offline-first-supermarket-pos Industry: Grocery retail Project status: private Outcome metrics: not published. Stack: TypeScript, PostgreSQL, SQLite (per-till local replica), React (tills and back office), Property-based testing (fast-check), Playwright end-to-end Summary: A supermarket in the mountains of Duhok, where electricity and internet drop every day. Instead of a smaller system for a hard place, the store got everything a big store has: 4 cashier lanes, stock, accounting, label scales, fingerprint attendance and an owner app on the phone. Every part has a fallback. If the internet drops, the lanes keep selling. If the store's server stops, they switch to the cloud. When everything comes back, every sale lands exactly once. Built by one engineer, checked by 736 test files, and published as a research paper. Problem: Up in the mountains the power cuts and the internet drops, often at the busiest hour. Most POS systems stop the moment the line goes, and a queue forms in seconds. The usual answer is a cheap, stripped-down system. The owner wanted the opposite: everything a big store has, on his phone, in Kurdish, working through every outage — with the engineer two to three hours away when something goes wrong. Approach: - Selling never waits for the internet: each cashier lane keeps its own copy of the store and sells on its own. - Three layers of fallback — cashier lane, in-store server, cloud. If one goes down the next takes over, automatically and only when it is proven safe. - No sale is lost or counted twice: when the connection comes back, every sale syncs exactly once, with a record nobody can quietly change. - Money is never refused: if something looks wrong — sold more than the stock, a price changed while offline — the sale goes through and is flagged for the owner. - The owner runs it all from a phone or tablet in Kurdish: prices, label scales, staff attendance and reports. - Nothing was cut for the mountains: full ERP, stock, accounting, scales, fingerprint attendance and a mobile back office. - Twenty real problems found during testing and installation became twenty fixes, each guarded by an automated test. ### MotelSystem — multilingual hotel platform with government-compliant reporting, live at tourism.krd URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/motelsystem Industry: Hospitality Project status: live Stack: Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, Cloudflare Workers, Supabase (Postgres + Auth), Tailwind CSS, Stripe, WhatsApp Business API Live: https://tourism.krd Summary: A multi-tenant hotel management platform built specifically for Kurdistan: walk-ins, deposits, dual-receipt printing, multilingual public booking site (EN/AR/KU), and full local-government reporting compliance. Live for paying customers at tourism.krd and proven through 33+ weekly production waves. Problem: Boutique hotels in Duhok and Erbil were stitching together Excel, paper regulatory forms, and free hotel booking widgets that didn't speak Kurdish or handle dual currency. Front-desk staff spent 30–45 minutes per check-in copying ID details into the official local-government .docx template by hand, with frequent missing-data errors caught only days later. Approach: - Designed a multi-tenant Postgres schema (Supabase) with strict RLS so each hotel's data is fully isolated. - Built a Next.js App Router admin UI with EN/AR/KU localization, RTL-aware layout, and offline-tolerant front-desk flows for unstable internet. - Implemented an end-to-end walk-in flow: room picker → deposit capture → dual-receipt printing (guest copy + accounting copy) in <30 seconds. - Reverse-engineered the local-government .docx (10-column RTL spreadsheet, color-coded data rows) and built a one-click export with multi-night tracking, missing-ID alerts, and field-level validation. - Set up Cloudflare Workers deployment with edge-cached customer-facing pages — hit the 10ms CPU budget without sacrificing dynamic features by pre-fetching in page.tsx and using the admin client for anonymous reads. - Shipped weekly waves (33 to date) with Stripe billing, WhatsApp confirmations, and a customer-side CMS the hotel manager can edit themselves. Results: - Front-desk check-in time reduced from 30–45 minutes to under 90 seconds. - Government reports submitted on time every day, with zero rejected submissions for missing data after the alert system shipped. - Customer-facing booking pages serve EN/AR/KU with sub-1.5s LCP on mobile across Kurdistan. - Operating in production with paying tenants for 12+ months. 33 weekly production waves shipped without a single full-system outage. - Owner of the system can run 100% of the business through one app — bookings, deposits, receipts, government reports, customer site CMS — without leaving the dashboard. ### SalonSystem — all-in-one platform for beauty businesses in Kurdistan, live at krd.beauty URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/salonsystem Industry: Beauty & wellness · Multi-tenant SaaS Project status: live Stack: Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, Cloudflare Pages, Supabase (Postgres + Auth), Tailwind CSS, WhatsApp Business API Live: https://krd.beauty Summary: An all-in-one SaaS for salons, spas, and beauty businesses in Kurdistan. Bookings, staff schedules, customer history, multilingual customer-facing booking pages (EN/AR/KU), inventory, and reporting — priced to be accessible for any salon in the region. Live in production at krd.beauty. Problem: Salons in Kurdistan run on paper appointment books, WhatsApp DMs, and phone calls. Owners lose track of recurring customers, no-shows are common, inventory leaks money, and there's no multilingual customer-facing booking experience. Off-the-shelf international SaaS doesn't speak Kurdish, doesn't handle local payment habits, and is priced for Western markets — putting it out of reach of the businesses that need it most. Approach: - All-in-one architecture — bookings, staff, inventory, customer history, and multilingual customer site, all under one login. No bolt-on apps, no separate vendors. - Multi-tenant Postgres schema with strict Row-Level Security — each salon's data is fully isolated. - Customer-facing booking pages in EN/AR/KU served from the edge, with sub-1.5s LCP across Kurdistan. - WhatsApp-first reminder system: confirmation on booking, day-before nudge, and post-visit follow-up. - Pricing structured for the Kurdistan market specifically — accessible to small and mid-size salons that international SaaS prices out. - Full data ownership: a salon can export their entire history at any time. No lock-in. Results: - Live in production at krd.beauty serving paying salon clients in Kurdistan. - All-in-one design means a single salon owner can run the entire business through one app — no juggling separate booking, inventory, and CRM tools. - EN/AR/KU customer-facing site means salons reach the full Kurdistani-Arabic-English customer base from day one. - Pricing structure deliberately accessible — built so small salons can adopt it, not just chains. ### smile.krd — the all-in-one clinic system for Kurdistan, with Claude & ChatGPT built in URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/dentalsystem Industry: Dental & healthcare · Multi-tenant SaaS Project status: live Stack: Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, Supabase (Postgres + Auth, row-level security), Tailwind CSS, WhatsApp Business API, Vercel Live: https://smile.krd Summary: One system runs the whole dental clinic: bookings, patients, tooth-by-tooth charts, X-rays and photos, treatment plans, payments in dinar and dollar, stock, lab work and the clinic's own website. Every staff member gets their own login, role and view — the doctor sees the chart, reception sees the calendar, the owner sees the money. And the owner can run the clinic just by talking to Claude or ChatGPT. In English, Arabic, Bahdini and Sorani. Live with clinics in Duhok, Hawler and Slemani. Problem: Dental clinics in Kurdistan run on three things that do not talk to each other: a paper appointment book, a filing cabinet of patient records, and a WhatsApp thread. Prices get written on a notepad. The end-of-day cash count is a guess reconciled by memory. International dental software exists, but it is priced for Western practices, does not speak Kurdish, assumes one currency, and assumes left-to-right layout. The nearest local alternative is a generic salon or appointment app with the labels changed — which any dentist can tell within about thirty seconds is not built for dentistry. A dental chart is not a booking form. Approach: - Digital dental chart — tooth-by-tooth charting with surfaces, restorations and periodontal pocket depths, with visual chart history over time - Treatment plans — multi-visit sequencing, estimates, insurance coverage per line item, and a patient-friendly view that can be printed or shared - X-ray and photo library — per-patient gallery for intra-oral photos, radiographs and before/after shots, annotated and timestamped, attachable to a specific treatment plan - Prescription pad — saved common prescriptions, attached to a visit, printed or sent on WhatsApp in one action - Lab work tracker — send-outs to crown and denture labs, expected return dates, and automatic patient notification when a case arrives - Medical history and allergy alerts surfaced at the point of care - Clinic-wide appointment calendar with daily, weekly and monthly views, drag-to-reschedule, and conflict warnings when a chair is already booked - Waiting-list automation and six-month recall lists - WhatsApp appointment confirmations, reminder blasts and birthday touchpoints - Online booking on the clinic's own domain, with their own branding and photos — a patient picks a service, a dentist and a time in under a minute - A real POS, not a bolted-on payment button — treatments and retail products in one checkout, cash, card and instalments, receipts printed to a thermal printer - Dual currency, IQD and USD, on the same till - Instalment plans and per-line-item insurance coverage, with the balance tracked until the patient has paid in full - End-of-day cash drawer audit that reconciles against the system - Dentist commissions per procedure, expense tracking by category, outstanding patient balances, monthly revenue against expenses - Product inventory with low-stock alerts, supplier and lab management - Loyalty points, VIP tiers, gift cards with unique codes, discount codes and sale pricing - Staff attendance via kiosk clock-in with face recognition or QR badge, with manager-approved manual entries and real timesheets - Roles and permissions per staff member - Reporting on top procedures by revenue, patient loyalty rankings, income by source and retention rate, exportable to PDF - This is the part most worth dwelling on, because it is the thing no other system in this market does. - The platform runs in English, Arabic, Kurdish Bahdini and Kurdish Sorani — and Bahdini and Sorani are treated as two separate complete languages, not one "Kurdish" setting. Each clinic picks its own dialect, so a practice in Duhok works in Bahdini while a practice in Hawler works in Sorani, on the same platform. - It goes further than the interface: every label in the system is editable — admin screens, the patient-facing site, receipts, messages. A clinic that uses its own term for a procedure can simply use it. That matters more in dentistry than in most fields, because clinical vocabulary in Kurdish is not standardised, and different practices genuinely say different things. - A tenant-isolated database per clinic with row-level security enforced server-side — no shared rows - Daily encrypted backups with 30-day retention - An audit log on every create, update and delete - Roles and permissions per staff member - Clinics go live the same day they sign up. Existing data — treatments, prices, dentists, patients, opening hours, and the next 30 days of booked appointments — is imported from whatever the clinic currently has, including Excel exports and paper registers. The clinic does not do the migration work themselves. Results: - 2,900+ appointments booked through the platform - Four working languages: English · Arabic · Kurdish Bahdini · Kurdish Sorani - IQD and USD on one POS, with the rate snapshotted per transaction - Clinics live the same day they sign up - Live in production, with clinics in Duhok, Hawler and Sulaymaniyah and 2,900+ appointments booked through the platform. Sold on published annual plans rather than by quotation, with a one-time lifetime licence available to multi-location dental groups on request. - A production POS with dual-currency IQD/USD handling, thermal receipt printing, instalments and an end-of-day cash drawer audit — running in real clinics, not a specification - Bahdini and Sorani as separate selectable languages in a live product, with fully editable labels - Multi-tenant architecture with row-level security holding medical records - Vertical depth over generic breadth — clinical charting built for how dentists actually work, which is exactly what off-the-shelf international SaaS and re-labelled local apps cannot provide ### A major tourism destination in Kurdistan — custom management system + trilingual platform (in development) URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/tourism-destination-platform Industry: Tourism & hospitality · Custom platform Project status: in-development Outcome metrics: not published. Stack: Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, Cloudflare (edge), Supabase (Postgres + Auth), Tailwind CSS Summary: A custom management system paired with a trilingual (EN/AR/KU) public platform for a major tourism destination in Kurdistan. In active development — the full case study, with the client named and outcomes measured, will be published when it goes live. Problem: A large tourism operation in Kurdistan runs its bookings, staff, and reporting across disconnected tools, while its public face has to serve visitors in three languages at once. Off-the-shelf platforms don't speak Kurdish, don't fit local operations, and price for Western markets — so the venue needs one custom system for operations and one fast, fully trilingual public platform, built together. Approach: - A custom management layer for the venue's day-to-day operations — built to fit how the team actually works, not forced onto a generic template. - A trilingual (EN/AR/KU) public platform with full right-to-left support at the layout level, edge-served and mobile-first for real Kurdistan network conditions. - One connected system: the public experience and the internal operations share a single source of truth, so nothing is entered twice. ### Obaida Beauty — custom business system for a single beauty practice URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/obaida-beauty Industry: Beauty & wellness Project status: live Outcome metrics: not published. Stack: Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, Cloudflare Pages, Supabase (Postgres + Auth), Tailwind CSS Summary: A single-tenant business system built specifically for Obaida Beauty. Tailored to the practice's actual workflow rather than the generic salon template — this is what off-the-shelf SaaS can't do. The patterns and lessons learned here are what fed into the multi-tenant SalonSystem product. Problem: Obaida Beauty's needs didn't fit any off-the-shelf salon SaaS — their workflow, customer relationships, and reporting were specific enough that bending a generic tool would have been slower than just building the right thing. Approach: - One-on-one discovery sessions to understand the practice end-to-end before writing a line of code. - Single-tenant build — no multi-tenancy overhead because there's only one tenant. - Multilingual customer-facing experience that fits how their clients actually communicate. - Workflow shaped to their team's habits rather than forcing the team to adapt to generic UI. ### eMed Store — online medical store for Kurdistan URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/emed-store Industry: Healthcare e-commerce Project status: live Outcome metrics: not published. Stack: Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, Cloudflare Pages, Supabase (Postgres + Auth), Tailwind CSS, WhatsApp Business API Summary: An online medical store built for the Kurdistan market — multilingual product catalog (EN/AR/KU), WhatsApp-driven order flow, and the cash-on-delivery + dual-currency reality that international e-commerce platforms ignore. Problem: Buyers wanted to order medical products without driving across town, but every off-the-shelf e-commerce template assumed credit-card-first checkout, English-only product names, and home-delivery from a single warehouse — none of which match how this store actually operates in Kurdistan. Approach: - Multilingual product catalog at the database level (EN/AR/KU per product, not bolted on). - WhatsApp-first order flow — customer selects products on the site, conversation moves to WhatsApp for confirmation and delivery details. - Dual-currency display and accounting that tracks IQD and USD separately and reconciles on a daily roll-up. - Cash-on-delivery as a first-class checkout method, not an afterthought. ## Public project and profile sources Media kit and project references: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/press - MotelSystem — tourism.krd: https://tourism.krd — Owned product. Public site for Serdar's hotel platform. Read the case study for his documented role, implementation and reported results. - SalonSystem — krd.beauty: https://krd.beauty — Owned product. Public site for Serdar's salon and beauty business platform, with a separate case study describing the build. - DentalSystem — smile.krd: https://smile.krd — Owned product. Public site for Serdar's dental clinic platform. Its case study covers clinical workflows, POS and Kurdish localization. - Serdar Dilshad — GitHub / sardarbircini: https://github.com/sardarbircini — Self-maintained public profile. Serdar's own public engineering profile. The displayed name, Duhok location and website link match this site's identity. ## Blog posts (21) ### Kurdish AI in 2026: what works and what doesn't URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/kurdish-ai-2026 Published: 2026-10-16 Tags: kurdish, ai, badini, sorani, speech-to-text, ocr, translation, kurdistan, duhok Can AI handle Kurdish in 2026? Writing and translation: usable with a human check. Speech and scanned documents: not yet, especially Badini. A fact-checked guide for businesses in Kurdistan. ### How I built a multilingual AI-assisted hotel system live in Kurdistan URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/motelsystem-case-study-deep-dive Published: 2026-05-06 Tags: case-study, motelsystem, hospitality, kurdistan A technical breakdown of motelsystem — the multi-tenant hotel platform I built and ship weekly: how I solved local-government reporting, ran on Cloudflare Workers' 10ms CPU budget, and made it work in EN/AR/KU. ### Real cost of AI automation for SMBs in Kurdistan in 2026 URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/ai-automation-cost-kurdistan-smbs Published: 2026-05-08 Tags: ai, pricing, kurdistan, smb An honest, numbers-first guide: what AI automation projects actually cost in Kurdistan today, broken down by build cost, monthly running cost, and break-even time. ### 12 AI use cases that actually work for businesses in Kurdistan today URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/best-ai-use-cases-kurdistan-businesses-2026 Published: 2026-05-12 Tags: ai, kurdistan, use-cases Twelve AI applications I've personally seen succeed in Kurdistan — and the four I keep recommending against, no matter how much hype they get. ### Building multilingual AI chatbots in English, Arabic, and Kurdish URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/multilingual-ai-chatbots-en-ar-ku Published: 2026-05-15 Tags: ai, chatbots, multilingual, kurdish What works, what breaks, and what nobody talks about when you ship an AI chatbot that needs to speak Kurdish reliably alongside Arabic and English. ### How to pick an AI consultant in Kurdistan — a buyer's checklist URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/how-to-pick-ai-consultant-kurdistan Published: 2026-05-19 Tags: ai, consulting, kurdistan, buyer-guide Eleven questions to ask any AI consultant before you sign anything — and the red flags I see most often when business owners in Kurdistan get burned. ### WhatsApp Business + AI automation: a practical guide for shops in Kurdistan URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/whatsapp-ai-automation-kurdistan-shops Published: 2026-05-22 Tags: ai, whatsapp, kurdistan, tutorial Two-week practical playbook for setting up an AI WhatsApp assistant — what it should and shouldn't handle, real cost numbers, and the five rules I always enforce. ### AI for restaurants and cafes in Duhok and Erbil URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/ai-restaurants-cafes-duhok-erbil Published: 2026-05-26 Tags: ai, restaurants, kurdistan, duhok, erbil Five AI-automation wins worth doing in 2026 for Kurdistan restaurants — from WhatsApp reservations to inventory waste prediction. With real numbers from a 60-cover Erbil restaurant. ### AI for Kurdistan e-commerce: Shopify, custom, or hybrid? URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/ai-kurdistan-ecommerce-shopify-custom Published: 2026-05-29 Tags: ai, ecommerce, shopify, kurdistan, comparison Eight decision questions to choose between Shopify, custom, and hybrid e-commerce builds in Kurdistan — and where AI fits in each path. ### AI for clinics and pharmacies in Kurdistan URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/ai-clinics-pharmacies-kurdistan Published: 2026-06-02 Tags: ai, healthcare, clinics, pharmacies, kurdistan Three high-leverage AI wins for Kurdistan healthcare — appointment booking, multilingual triage, pharmacy refill orchestration. With privacy considerations and real cost numbers. ### AI for schools and tutoring centers in Kurdistan URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/ai-schools-tutoring-kurdistan Published: 2026-06-09 Tags: ai, education, schools, tutoring, kurdistan Four AI projects worth doing in 2026 for Kurdistan schools and tutoring centers — parent assistant, homework collection, report-card explainers, scheduling. With student-data privacy and real cost numbers. ### AI for logistics and last-mile delivery in Kurdistan URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/ai-logistics-delivery-kurdistan Published: 2026-06-12 Tags: ai, logistics, delivery, kurdistan, operations Five AI wins for Kurdistan delivery operations in 2026 — WhatsApp order status, smart route batching, cash-on-delivery reconciliation, failed-delivery triage, shift handoff. With real numbers from a 12-driver operation. ### AI for salons, gyms, and wellness studios in Kurdistan URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/ai-salons-gyms-wellness-kurdistan Published: 2026-06-16 Tags: ai, salons, gyms, wellness, kurdistan Four AI projects that pay back in 6–10 weeks for Kurdistan salons, gyms, and wellness studios — WhatsApp booking, win-back, churn detection, multilingual content. With real numbers from a 4-chair Duhok salon. ### Launching SalonSystem: an all-in-one platform for Kurdistan salons URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/salonsystem-launch Published: 2026-06-20 Tags: case-study, salonsystem, saas, kurdistan, salons SalonSystem is live at krd.beauty — bookings, staff, customer history, inventory, WhatsApp reminders, and reporting in one trilingual app, priced for Kurdistan salons. The story behind why I built it and where it's going. ### Launching MotelSystem: a multilingual hotel platform live at tourism.krd URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/motelsystem-launch Published: 2026-06-05 Tags: case-study, motelsystem, saas, kurdistan, hospitality MotelSystem is live at tourism.krd — walk-ins, deposits, dual-receipt printing, a trilingual booking site (EN/AR/KU), and one-click government-compliant reporting in one app, built for Kurdistan hotels. The story behind it and where it's going. ### AI vs no-code: a Kurdistan perspective for 2026 URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/ai-vs-no-code-kurdistan Published: 2026-06-23 Tags: ai, no-code, kurdistan, comparison When to use no-code, when to use AI, and the five Kurdistan cases that show the split — with the four mistakes I see most often when owners pick the wrong tool. ### The AI-readiness checklist for any Kurdistan business URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/ai-readiness-checklist-kurdistan Published: 2026-06-26 Tags: ai, readiness, checklist, kurdistan, smb A 16-item, 0–2 score checklist covering data, people, technical, and business prep before you spend a dinar on AI — plus four bonus items that move you from ready to fast. ### When NOT to use AI: 7 honest "don't build this" cases from Kurdistan URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/when-not-to-use-ai-kurdistan Published: 2026-06-30 Tags: ai, kurdistan, counter-narrative, honest Seven Kurdistan businesses I walked away from AI projects in the last twelve months — what they wanted, why I said no, and the cheaper, more honest answer that actually worked. ### AI agents vs chatbots: which does your Kurdistan business actually need? URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/ai-agents-vs-chatbots-kurdistan Published: 2026-07-07 Tags: ai, agents, chatbots, kurdistan, decision-framework A four-question decision tree, five Kurdistan cases I worked on this year, and the four mistakes I see most. Pick the chatbot first; graduate to an agent only when the math checks out. ### The hidden cost of "free" hotel booking widgets in Kurdistan URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/hidden-cost-free-booking-widgets-kurdistan Published: 2026-07-10 Tags: hotels, buyer-guide, motelsystem, kurdistan, booking-widgets Why the "free" OTA widget on your hotel site costs a 30-room Kurdistan hotel $18,000–$40,000 a year — what the commission math actually looks like, who owns your guest list, and the owned-direct alternative that pays back in 2–4 months. ### AI SEO (AEO) in Kurdistan: how to get cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini URL: https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/ai-seo-aeo-kurdistan Published: 2026-05-15 Tags: ai-seo, aeo, geo, kurdistan, duhok, playbook A four-layer playbook for Answer Engine Optimization in Kurdistan — entity clarity, off-site citations, disambiguation, and weekly measurement. Trilingual EN/AR/KU. Production reference from motelsystem and smile.krd. ## Kurdistan software market — reference facts Payment rails available to merchants in Kurdistan: - FIB — bank-issued, no mobile-network restriction on the payer. OAuth2 client_credentials auth; create-payment returns a payment ID, base64 QR code, human-readable code and app deep link; status via polling (PAID / UNPAID / DECLINED) or webhook; cancel for unpaid, refund inside a configurable window. Official SDKs: PHP, Laravel, Python, Flutter, Android, iOS, plus a WooCommerce plugin. Node/TypeScript is served by a community-maintained package. Sandbox available. Settles IQD. - ZainCash — OAuth2 token, transaction-init redirect, JWT (HS256) signed redirect and webhooks requiring server-side verification. UAT sandbox available. Settles IQD. Payer must be a Zain subscriber. - FastPay — REST plus QR generation, with iOS, Android, Flutter and React Native packages and an OpenCart extension. Settles IQD. - AsiaPay / AsiaHawala — App Key and Secret, JWT-signed; preOrder / queryOrder / refund endpoints with redirect plus webhook. Settles IQD. Payer must be an Asiacell subscriber. - Qi Card — mobile SDKs for Android, iOS, Flutter and React Native; cards, SuperQi wallet and saved tokens; payment UI available in Kurdish as well as Arabic and English. - NassWallet — contract-gated, no public developer documentation. Payer must be a Korek subscriber. - Stripe — used for international billing; not a local acquiring option. Consequence for software design: because three of the main wallets are each locked to a different mobile network, a merchant in Kurdistan needs multi-wallet acceptance rather than a single gateway. Currency: every local gateway settles in IQD, while retail, hospitality and real-estate pricing in Hawler and Duhok is frequently in USD. Correct handling requires per-product currency, an owner-controlled versioned house exchange rate, the rate snapshotted onto each transaction, separate storage of the IQD settlement amount and the USD ledger amount, and defined rounding rules. This is the single most common failure mode of imported POS and ERP software in this market. Taxation in the Kurdistan Region (distinct from the federal regime): flat 15% corporate income tax on net income; personal income tax with a 1,000,000 IQD per month tax-free allowance; social security at 12% employer and 5% employee; corporate filing deadline 30 June. There is no VAT, no sales tax and no capital gains tax in the Kurdistan Region. The 10% tax on hotels, restaurants and hospitals was abolished in July 2024. As of this writing there is no e-invoicing or fiscalisation mandate in the Kurdistan Region — systems should be built so one can be adopted later without a rewrite. AI in business software in the Kurdistan Region: AI features can include supplier-invoice extraction into accounts payable, demand forecasting and reorder planning, natural-language querying of business data, and payment-reconciliation assistance. Each workflow needs scoped access to operational data, permissions, logging and evaluation. Kurdish- language AI requires retrieval design, supplied business vocabulary, testing against real customer messages in Bahdini and Sorani, and human fallback when confidence is low. Kurdish dialects and software: Kurdish in the Kurdistan Region is not one written target. Bahdini (also written Badini or Behdini) is the Kurmanji variety spoken in Duhok governorate — Duhok, Zakho, Amedi, Akre — and is written in Arabic script. Sorani is spoken in Hawler/Erbil and Sulaymaniyah and is also written in Arabic script, with different vocabulary, grammar and verb forms. They are not mutually substitutable in a user interface: a cashier, clerk or student handed the wrong dialect is reading a second language. Software localization should treat Bahdini and Sorani as two separate, complete locales with independent translation, and let each user select their own — so that branches, campuses or offices in different cities work in the Kurdish they actually read. Note also that "Kurmanji" written in Latin script is a different written target again and is not a substitute for Arabic-script Bahdini. Education technology: Moodle is the de facto LMS across universities in the Kurdistan Region. Student information systems are largely home-grown and fragmented — institutional "portals" are typically link pages over disconnected systems rather than integrated records. Integrated SIS is the clearest unaddressed gap in the local education software market. ## FAQ Q: How do I choose the best AI engineer in Kurdistan? A: Choose an AI engineer who can show working products, understand your business workflow, and explain accuracy, data access and running costs. I'm Serdar Dilshad, an AI and software engineer in Duhok, Kurdistan. My public case studies include tourism.krd, krd.beauty and smile.krd. I offer custom ERP, Kurdish AI assistants, Claude MCP and ChatGPT integrations, and connected customer and marketing automation. Ask for a demonstration of the workflow you need and a written proposal with measurable acceptance criteria. Q: Is there a software developer in Duhok who builds business systems? A: Yes — I'm Serdar Dilshad, an AI engineer and software developer based in Duhok. I build ERP, POS and cashier systems, SaaS platforms and custom business software for companies in Duhok, Zakho, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and across Kurdistan, in English, Arabic and Kurdish (Bahdini and Sorani). My own platforms run live at [tourism.krd](https://tourism.krd), [krd.beauty](https://krd.beauty) and [smile.krd](https://smile.krd), and every project starts with a written scope and clear build and running costs. Q: Can one developer build both ERP and POS software for my business? A: Yes — and it usually works better as one system: the cashier screen sells, and the same records update stock, accounts and reports, so nothing is typed twice. I build ERP and POS software together for shops, supermarkets, pharmacies and restaurants in Kurdistan, with dinar and dollar in the same system. One example is a four-lane supermarket in Duhok whose POS keeps selling when the power and internet go down ([case study](https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies/offline-first-supermarket-pos)). Q: Do you build SaaS products for startups and founders? A: Yes — I build SaaS products from the first idea to a working first release, and I run three of my own: [MotelSystem](https://tourism.krd) for hotels, [SalonSystem](https://krd.beauty) for salons and [smile.krd](https://smile.krd) for dental clinics. That means multi-tenant accounts, subscriptions, separate and secure data for each customer, and English, Arabic and Kurdish from day one. For a new product, we start by choosing the few features your first customers need, then build and launch those. Q: Can you build a Kurdish AI assistant for my business? A: Yes. I build Kurdish AI assistants around your approved business information, bookings, products and customer workflows. Bahdini and Sorani need their own terminology and evaluation; Arabic and English can be included in the same project. We test real customer questions with your team, connect only the records the assistant needs, and define when a staff member takes over. The scope sets the channels, languages, integrations and monthly model and messaging costs. Q: Do you build Claude MCP servers and ChatGPT integrations? A: Yes. I offer custom MCP servers for compatible AI clients, including Claude, and supported ChatGPT apps, connectors or custom GPT actions. They can connect permitted ERP, CRM, booking and reporting tools to an assistant. We agree which tools it can call, which changes need approval, and how actions are logged and tested. Availability depends on the chosen client's supported features and your account. Scheduled autonomous workflows are scoped separately with clear ownership and operating costs. Q: Can ERP, AI customer replies and marketing automation work in one system? A: Yes. A scoped business system can connect stock, sales, finance, staff, CRM, customer replies and supported Meta or TikTok marketing workflows around shared records. We map your operations, prioritize the work that consumes time, then deliver and measure each phase. Your team keeps approval over spending and sensitive changes. The proposal lists included modules, account/API dependencies, training, support and ongoing hosting, AI, messaging and advertising costs. Coverage and savings are measured against your workflow after rollout. Q: Who builds POS systems in Kurdistan? A: Several companies sell point-of-sale software in Kurdistan — Ejaf Technology, MiroTech, Geno, BoMN, Standing and Awrosoft are the established local vendors, mostly in Hawler. I build custom POS systems from Duhok for businesses whose workflow does not fit an off-the-shelf product: multi-branch operations, businesses pricing in USD while their payment gateway settles in IQD, and anyone who needs the interface and receipts to work properly in Kurdish. If a packaged product genuinely fits you, I will tell you so and name it — that is a shorter conversation and it costs you nothing. Q: How much does a POS system cost in Kurdistan? A: It depends on scope, and any vendor quoting you a number before understanding your business is guessing. What actually drives the price is knowable, though: the number of branches and tills, whether you need kitchen operations, whether you need batch and expiry control, how many payment wallets you want to accept, whether you need full dual-currency reconciliation, and — usually the biggest hidden factor — how much data has to be migrated and what condition it is in. Packaged local products are typically cheaper up front; custom is worth paying for when you run several branches, when your workflow is genuinely unusual, or when you need an integration nobody else will build. I give a fixed scope and a fixed price in writing after a free scoping call, so the number you see is the number you pay. Q: What is the best POS system for a restaurant in Kurdistan? A: The right restaurant POS in Kurdistan has to do four things most imported products do badly: handle IQD and USD on the same bill with a stable exchange rate, keep taking orders when the internet drops, print and display correctly in Kurdish and Arabic RTL, and accept more than one mobile wallet — because ZainCash, AsiaPay and NassWallet are each locked to a different mobile network, so a single-wallet checkout turns paying customers away. Beyond that: table map, table-side ordering, kitchen tickets, course firing and split bills. Note that the 10% tax on restaurants was abolished in July 2024, so you should not be paying for a tax module you no longer need. Q: Can you integrate FIB payments into my website or system? A: Yes. FIB authenticates with OAuth2 client credentials, then a create-payment call returns a payment ID, a base64 QR code, a short readable code and a deep link into the FIB app; you confirm the result either by polling the status endpoint or by receiving a webhook. FIB publishes official SDKs for PHP, Laravel, Python, Flutter, Android and iOS plus a WooCommerce plugin, and there is a sandbox to test against. The part that takes real work is not the API call — it is idempotency, webhook verification, a proper payment state machine, and reconciling FIB's dinar settlement against a ledger denominated in USD. Cost depends on how many rails you want, whether reconciliation is included, and what it plugs into; it is meaningfully cheaper bundled into a POS or ERP build than commissioned standalone. Q: Which payment gateway should a business in Kurdistan use? A: Not one — several. ZainCash requires the customer to be on Zain, AsiaPay requires Asiacell, and NassWallet requires Korek, so any single-wallet checkout is invisible to most of the market. FIB is the usual anchor because it is a bank rather than a telco and carries no network restriction on the payer, and it has the best public documentation. FastPay is widely held locally. Qi Card is worth adding if you need card acceptance, and it is one of the few whose payment interface ships in Kurdish. Practically: FIB plus one or two wallets your customers actually use, presented side by side at checkout. Q: Do I need an ERP or just accounting software? A: You need accounting software if your problem is producing financial statements. You need an ERP once your problems are operational — stock counts that do not match the shelf, two branches quoting different prices, payroll taking three days because hours and salaries live in different places. The tell is that the same number exists in more than one system and they disagree. Start with the two modules that are actually on fire, usually inventory and purchasing, and add accounting underneath once they are feeding it. Buying a full ERP suite up front is how most of these projects fail. Q: Is there VAT or e-invoicing in the Kurdistan Region? A: No. The Kurdistan Region has no VAT, no sales tax and no capital gains tax, and as of this writing there is no e-invoicing or fiscalisation mandate. Corporate income tax is a flat 15% on net income with a 30 June filing deadline, personal income tax carries a 1,000,000 IQD monthly tax-free allowance, and social security is 12% employer and 5% employee. The 10% tax on hotels, restaurants and hospitals was abolished in July 2024. The sensible engineering position is to build books that can produce a compliant e-invoice later without a rewrite — most neighbouring markets have adopted mandates over the past five years — but not to pay today for compliance with a rule that does not exist. Q: How do you handle USD and IQD in one system? A: Properly, which is rarer than it sounds. Each product carries its own currency; the house exchange rate is set by the owner and versioned with a change log; and critically, the rate in force is snapshotted onto every transaction at the moment of sale rather than looked up later — so a report run three months from now still reconciles instead of silently re-pricing your history. The gateway's IQD settlement amount and your USD ledger amount are stored as two separate fields, never one converted one, and rounding rules are defined once and applied everywhere. Systems that skip this drift a little every month and nobody notices until year-end. Q: Do you build student information systems for universities? A: Yes. Nearly every university in Kurdistan runs Moodle for teaching and almost nothing else joins up — the "student portal" is usually a page of links to separate systems, each holding its own copy of the same student. I build the administrative layer that Moodle was never meant to be: admissions, registration with prerequisites and capacity, grades with a moderation workflow, GPA and progression rules, verifiable transcripts typeset correctly in Kurdish and Arabic, and fees. Moodle stays and gets synchronised — courses, enrolments, grades, single sign-on — rather than replaced. It is delivered in phases, priced per phase, with each phase live before the next begins — so you commit to one step at a time rather than to a whole institutional rewrite. Q: Will my data be locked in if I hire you? A: No, and it is a written condition of every engagement. You get full export of your entire database at any time, a documented schema, written technical documentation rather than just a user manual, and training for your own IT staff. Everything is built on standard, widely-known technology — Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL — specifically so that any competent developer can take over if I am ever unavailable. Institutions and companies outlive vendors, and pricing software so that leaving is painful is a business model I am not interested in. Q: Do you work with businesses outside Kurdistan? A: Yes, though the site is written for Kurdistan because that is where the specific knowledge is worth the most. The dual-currency, multi-wallet and Kurdish/Arabic RTL work transfers directly to neighbouring markets, and I take remote work in English for clients elsewhere. Pricing for the Kurdistan market is deliberately lower than Western rates; work for clients abroad is quoted separately. Q: What makes you different from other software companies in Kurdistan? A: Four things, and they are all checkable rather than claims. I publish my pricing, where almost every local vendor is quote-on-demand only. I publish technical documentation and integration guides, where effectively no local vendor does. I work natively in Kurdish — both Bahdini and Sorani — as well as Arabic and English, where the largest local competitors ship English and Arabic only. And I work alone with no subcontractors, so the person who scopes your project is the person who builds it. The trade-off is honest: I cannot staff a twenty-person on-site rollout. If that is what you need, you want a larger firm and I will say so. Q: How long does a POS or ERP project take? A: A single-branch POS with checkout, inventory and reporting is typically four to eight weeks. A first ERP module set is six to twelve weeks. A full multi-module ERP rollout with data migration runs three to six months, and a university student information system runs in phases across six to eighteen months with each phase live before the next begins. The variable that moves these numbers most is not the code — it is how clean your existing data is, and how quickly your side can answer questions. Q: Can you migrate us off our old system? A: Yes, and it is part of the job rather than an extra. That covers extraction from Excel, from old desktop or Access-based systems, or from a product whose vendor has disappeared — then cleaning the master data, mapping the chart of accounts, and running the old and new systems in parallel until the numbers agree for a full month before anything is switched off. Any migration proposal that does not include a parallel-run period is a migration proposal that will go badly. Q: Do you build software in Kurdish? Bahdini or Sorani? A: Both, as two separate complete languages rather than one label. This matters more than most vendors admit: Bahdini is what people read in Duhok, Zakho, Amedi and Akre, and Sorani is what people read in Hawler and Sulaymaniyah — they are not interchangeable, and handing a cashier or a student the wrong one means they are working in a second language on a screen they use hundreds of times a day. Most software sold here either ships no Kurdish at all, or ships Sorani alone labelled "Kurdish", which leaves Duhok governorate unserved. In my systems every interface string, receipt, invoice, payslip and transcript exists in both, each user picks their own at login, and right-to-left layout is built in from the start rather than patched on. I am based in Duhok and Bahdini is my own language, so I write it rather than commissioning it. This is not a promise — it is running: [smile.krd](https://smile.krd), my dental clinic platform, is live in production in all four languages, with each clinic picking its own dialect and every label in the system editable down to the receipt. Q: Why don't you publish fixed prices? A: Because a POS for one till and a POS for a six-branch group are not the same product, and any number I printed would be wrong for one of you. What I publish instead is exactly what drives the price up and down — branches, modules, integrations, currencies, and above all how much data has to be migrated and what condition it is in — so you can estimate your own scope before we ever speak. Then you get a free scoping call and a written proposal with a fixed scope and a fixed price. Not an hourly estimate that grows. If the scope changes mid-project, we agree the change and its cost in writing first. Q: Can you add AI to my POS or ERP system? A: Yes, and it works far better when the same person builds both — because then the AI reads your live database instead of a stale export. The use cases that reliably pay for themselves are unglamorous: supplier-invoice extraction straight into accounts payable with three-way matching, demand forecasting and reorder planning that accounts for seasonality and Ramadan and Newroz peaks, natural-language reporting so an owner can ask "which branch lost money last month" in Kurdish on their phone, exception detection for duplicate payments and price drift, and settlement reconciliation matching across two currencies. What does *not* pay for itself is a chatbot on your website that cannot see your stock. I will tell you which is which for your business before you spend anything. Q: Do you build AI assistants for businesses in Kurdistan? A: Yes — that is one of the things I have been doing longest. WhatsApp assistants that answer customers in their own language, AI receptionists for hotels and clinics, booking and scheduling assistants, sales-lead qualifiers that hand warm leads to a human, and document-processing pipelines that read invoices, IDs and receipts. The difference from a generic chatbot is that these are wired into a real system — live stock, real bookings, actual order status — so the answers are true rather than plausible. Every AI decision is logged and auditable, and there is always a defined fallback to a human when confidence is low. Q: Does AI work in Kurdish? A: Partly, and honestly less well than vendors imply. General models handle English well, Arabic acceptably, and Kurdish poorly — **Bahdini worst of all**, because far less written Bahdini exists for them to have learned from. Sorani is somewhat better served but still well behind Arabic. So "we'll just add AI in Kurdish" is a claim from someone who has not tried it. Making it work in production takes deliberate engineering: retrieval over your own content, your business vocabulary supplied as ground truth, evaluation against real messages from your actual customers rather than a demo script, and a clean handover to a human when the model is unsure. I do this work because my own products need it and because Bahdini is my first language — but I will also tell you when the honest answer for your use case is "not yet in Kurdish." Tool by tool — chat, translation, speech and scanning — is in [Kurdish AI in 2026](https://serdardilshad.dev/en/blog/kurdish-ai-2026). Q: Should I add AI to my business, or is it hype? A: Both, depending on which part. The genuinely valuable applications for a business in Kurdistan today are narrow and boring: reading documents so nobody retypes them, answering the same customer question at 2am, forecasting stock, matching payments to invoices, and drafting repetitive correspondence. The hype is everything that promises to replace judgement. My consulting work exists specifically to draw that line — a structured audit, then a written plan that names the projects worth doing, the realistic build and running costs, and explicitly the projects you should *not* do. You can act on that plan without hiring me for the build. I have walked away from AI projects for businesses here and written publicly about why. Q: Is there dental clinic software for Kurdistan? A: Yes — I build and run [smile.krd](https://smile.krd), a dental clinic operating system live in production with practices in Duhok, Hawler and Sulaymaniyah and over 2,900 appointments booked through it. It covers the clinical side properly rather than being a booking app with dental labels: tooth-by-tooth charting with surfaces, restorations and periodontal pocket depths, multi-visit treatment plans with insurance coverage and instalments, a per-patient x-ray and intra-oral photo library, a prescription pad, and lab-work tracking. It also runs the business side — a dual-currency POS for treatments and retail products with thermal receipts and an end-of-day cash drawer audit, dentist commissions, inventory, recalls and WhatsApp reminders, and an online booking site on the clinic's own domain. It runs in English, Arabic, Kurdish Bahdini and Kurdish Sorani, with the dialect chosen per clinic. Clinics go live the same day and I migrate the existing data, including from paper registers. Q: Do you sell your own software products, or only custom projects? A: Both, and it is worth knowing which you want. I operate three live multi-tenant SaaS products on published subscription pricing — [smile.krd](https://smile.krd) for dental clinics, [SalonSystem](https://krd.beauty) for salons and beauty businesses, and [MotelSystem](https://tourism.krd) for hotels. If you run one of those business types, subscribing is far cheaper and faster than commissioning anything, and you can be live the same day. If your workflow genuinely does not fit a product, I take custom projects — POS, ERP, payment integrations, university systems and AI work — scoped and quoted individually. The products are also the evidence for the custom work: dual-currency POS, both Kurdish dialects, multi-tenant row-level security and WhatsApp-driven workflows are not claims on a page, they are running for paying customers. Q: How many businesses actually use your systems? A: 17 systems are currently running in production — a mix of multi-tenant products and custom systems built for a single business — serving 29 businesses across the Kurdistan Region: 14 in Duhok, 11 in Hawler, and 4 in Slemani. Those are real counts, verified August 2026 — not estimates and not rounded up. Six of them are written up as case studies on this site; the rest are custom systems built for a single business, which I don't name publicly. Q: Who are you and what do you actually do? A: I'm Serdar Dilshad, a software engineer based in Duhok, Kurdistan. I build AI automation, custom web platforms, and multilingual systems for businesses across Kurdistan. I work in English, Arabic, and Kurdish. Q: How much does AI automation cost for a small business in Kurdistan? A: A focused AI automation project for an SMB in Kurdistan typically lands between $1,500 and $6,000 for the build, plus monthly running costs of $30–$220 depending on usage (LLM API + hosting). Prices are deliberately set for the Kurdistan market — Western SaaS prices don't make sense here. I scope every project so you see the breakdown before we start. Q: Do AI assistants understand Kurdish? A: Modern LLMs like GPT-4o, Claude, and Gemini handle Sorani and Kurmanji reasonably well for everyday tasks, but they make mistakes on idioms, dialects, and specific terminology. For business use I always add a Kurdish-specific evaluation layer plus human review for high-stakes outputs. Q: What can AI realistically do for my business in Kurdistan today? A: Today, the high-leverage uses in Kurdistan are: WhatsApp customer service in EN/AR/KU, document data extraction (IDs, receipts, invoices), automated booking confirmations, lead qualification, and content/translation pipelines. AI is weaker at: legally-binding decisions, anything needing real-time local knowledge it wasn't trained on, and tasks where one mistake is catastrophic. Q: Will AI replace my employees? A: No — but AI changes which work makes economic sense to keep human. A receptionist who answers 200 routine WhatsApp messages a day becomes 10× more valuable if AI handles the routine 180 and the human handles the 20 that actually need judgment. Plan for redeployment, not replacement. Q: How do you charge — hourly or fixed price? A: Almost always fixed-price for a defined scope. I write the scope with you, fix the price, and we both sign. If scope changes mid-project, we discuss before we touch the budget. Hourly rates exist for retainers and audits but are unusual for build projects. Q: Do you accept payment in IQD or USD? A: Both. I work with USD invoicing internationally and IQD or USD locally — bank transfer, cash, FastPay, or international wire. I price in USD by default to remove FX surprises mid-project; we settle in whichever currency is convenient. Q: Can I pay in installments? A: Yes — typical structure is 30% on signing, 40% on milestone, 30% on launch. For larger projects we do milestone-based payments tied to delivery. Q: How long does a typical project take? A: An AI automation project: 2–4 weeks. A custom system: 6–14 weeks. An audit: 1–2 weeks. I send a written timeline before contract — and a weekly written update after we start. Q: Do you sign NDAs? A: Yes, always. I sign NDAs before scoping calls if you ask. Every project includes a confidentiality clause by default, and I never use client data to train models or include identifiable details in case studies without written permission. Q: Will I own the code you write? A: Yes. On project completion you receive the full source code, deployment access, and documentation. I do not retain rights or charge usage fees afterward. You can hire me for ongoing maintenance, hand it to another team, or run it yourself — your call. Q: What happens after the project launches? A: 30 days of bug-fix support is included free. After that, I offer optional retainer agreements ($250–$1,500/month depending on scope) for monitoring, updates, and feature work. No retainer required — many clients self-host and only call me when they need something new. Q: Do you only work with businesses in Kurdistan? A: Most of my work is for businesses in Kurdistan — Duhok, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Zakho, Halabja. I take international remote clients too, but my Kurdistan focus is what makes my multilingual + local-government-reporting + local-context expertise valuable in the first place. Q: Can you handle local-government reporting in your systems? A: Yes. The motelsystem case study includes local-government-compliant reporting (10-column RTL spreadsheet, multi-night tracking, missing-data alerts, and the official .docx output format). I can extend that pattern to clinics, schools, or any business that has government reporting obligations in Kurdistan. Q: Are your systems mobile-friendly given Kurdistan's network conditions? A: Yes — mobile-first by default. I optimize for inconsistent 4G, build with Cloudflare's edge network so pages load fast across Kurdistan, and target Lighthouse scores above 95 on mobile. Most of my clients see >70% mobile traffic; the system is sized for that. Q: Can AI handle WhatsApp Business messages for me? A: Yes — this is one of the highest-leverage uses for businesses in Kurdistan. I build AI agents on top of WhatsApp Business API that answer in EN/AR/KU, route human-needed conversations to your team, and log everything in your dashboard. Setup typically takes 1–2 weeks. Q: How do I know if AI is right for my business? A: AI is worth it when you have repetitive tasks, structured data, and a clear pain point. It's not worth it when the work needs nuanced judgment, the data is messy or scarce, or one mistake is catastrophic. Book a free 15-min scoping call and I'll tell you straight — including 'don't do this' if that's the answer. Q: Can I keep my data inside Kurdistan for compliance? A: Mostly yes — application data stays in whatever region you choose (Cloudflare's nearest data centers serve Kurdistan from EU/Middle East). LLM providers process inference outside the region; for sensitive data we either use providers with on-region deployment or run open-weight models on private infra. I scope this per project. Q: What's the difference between a chatbot and an AI agent? A: A chatbot answers questions. An AI agent takes actions — books an appointment, updates your database, sends a confirmation message, escalates to a human, prints a receipt. Most businesses think they want a chatbot but actually want an agent. The build cost is 1.5–3× higher but the impact is 5–10× higher. Q: Why hire you instead of a freelancer on Upwork? A: An Upwork freelancer probably doesn't speak Kurdish, can't sit in your office for a half-day workshop, doesn't know how local-government reporting actually works in Kurdistan, doesn't take regional bank transfers, and disappears at 3 AM if your hotel system breaks. I do all of those. If your project actually doesn't need any of that, hire the freelancer — I'll tell you to. Q: Do you work alone or with a team? A: Solo on most builds. For larger projects I bring in trusted collaborators (designer, junior developer, translator) on contract. You always have one point of contact: me. I won't disappear behind 'the team.' Q: Can I integrate AI into my existing system without rebuilding it? A: Yes, often. If your system has APIs (or even decent database access), I can layer AI capabilities on top — chatbot, document extraction, summary generation — without rebuilding the core. Sometimes a partial rebuild ends up cheaper long-term; we discuss honestly during scoping. Q: How do I prevent AI from hallucinating to my customers? A: Three layers: (1) RAG — the model only answers from your verified documents, (2) tool-use restrictions — the model can't invent products or prices, only read from your database, (3) escalation rules — uncertainty above a threshold goes to a human. With these I get fewer than 1 in 1,000 user-facing hallucinations on production systems. Q: Do you train your AI on Kurdish data? A: Rarely full pre-training — that's expensive and not needed for most projects. Usually I fine-tune existing multilingual models on Kurdish-specific tasks (terminology, dialects, your business's tone), or use few-shot examples in prompts. For most SMB projects this gets you 95% of the way without training a model from scratch. Q: Have you actually shipped a real product? A: Yes — motelsystem is live in production with real paying customers in Kurdistan. It handles bookings, multilingual customer-facing pages, deposit + receipt printing, local-government reporting, walk-ins, and dual-currency. See the case study for the technical breakdown and outcomes. Q: What if I don't know exactly what I want? A: Normal — that's why scoping is a separate paid step ($750–$2,000 depending on complexity, and the fee credits against the build if you go forward with me). I run a structured discovery, write up a spec, and you can take that spec to anyone, including me. Many clients hire me for the build after scoping; some take the spec and build internally. Both are fine. Q: Can AI translate my website to Kurdish accurately? A: Modern AI gets you 80–90% of the way for general content. For 100% you need a Kurdish-fluent reviewer to catch idioms and tone, especially for marketing copy. I include human review by default in translation pipelines — and yes, I'm one of the reviewers. Q: What languages does your code/system support? A: By default: English, Arabic, and Kurdish (Sorani by default; Kurmanji on request). RTL is fully supported at the layout level — not just text direction. I can add other languages on request; the underlying architecture supports it without rewriting. Q: Can we meet in person in Duhok? A: Yes — I work from Duhok and can meet in person there. For Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Zakho, or other cities I travel for kickoff or major project moments; routine work is remote. Q: How can I get started? A: Email sardarbircini@gmail.com or message me on WhatsApp with two lines about your business and what's slowing you down. We'll schedule a free 15-minute call within a few days. No commitment until you've seen a written proposal with scope, timeline, and price. Q: Why is your portfolio so focused on Kurdistan specifically? A: Because generic Western SaaS and generic Middle Eastern dev shops both miss the same thing — Kurdish language, RTL UX, local-government reporting, dual-currency, and the local trust dynamics that decide whether software gets adopted. I'm betting that being deep on Kurdistan beats being shallow on five regions. Q: What's the fastest AI win I can ship in two weeks? A: For most SMBs in Kurdistan: a WhatsApp auto-responder that answers FAQ-level questions in EN/AR/KU and routes anything sales-related to a human. Two weeks, build cost ~$1,800, immediate impact on response time and customer satisfaction. Highest-ROI starter project I sell. Q: Can AI work without internet at the front desk? A: Mostly no — modern LLMs need internet to call the API. But you can run smaller open-weight models (like Llama 3.1 8B) locally on a decent laptop for translation and basic Q&A. For Kurdistan front-desk reality where internet drops occasionally, I architect critical paths to work offline (deposits, ID capture, walk-ins) and degrade AI features gracefully when offline. Q: What if I'm not satisfied with the result? A: Every project has a written acceptance criteria signed at scoping. If the deliverable doesn't meet that criteria, I fix it on my time and cost. If we genuinely disagree on whether criteria were met, we go to a third-party arbiter we both pre-agree on. In four years of paid work I've never reached that point — written scope at the start prevents it. Q: Are you a one-man shop or do you have a team? A: I lead solo on most builds. For projects past ~$8K I bring in trusted collaborators on contract — a designer for visual systems, a junior dev for parallelizable work, a translator for high-stakes Kurdish copy. Always one point of contact: me. I don't disappear behind 'the team.' Q: Can you work for equity or revenue share instead of cash? A: Rarely, and only for businesses I'd genuinely use myself. The bar is high because equity deals create alignment problems for the kind of advisory work I do. Cash arrangements work better for everyone. If you really want to pitch equity, send a written proposal — but expect me to negotiate hard for cash on top. Q: Do you understand Kurdish business etiquette and decision-making? A: Yes. Decisions in most Kurdistan family businesses run through the founder or eldest active partner. Time-to-decision is longer than Western SaaS sales cycles assume. Trust is built face-to-face first, software second. I structure proposals and pricing for that reality, not for hypothetical Silicon Valley buyers. Q: Will you train my staff to use the AI system? A: Yes. Every project includes a 2–4 hour training session in the language(s) your team speaks (English, Arabic, Bahdini Kurdish, or Sorani Kurdish), with written documentation in EN/AR/KU. I record the session so new hires can watch later. If your team needs ongoing support, I offer a thin retainer ($200–$400/month) for monthly office-hours. Q: What happens to my project if you get hit by a bus? A: Real question, real answer. Every client receives full source code in their own GitHub org, deployment access in their own Cloudflare account, and database access in their own Supabase project — all in their name, not mine. If something happened to me, you could hand the code to any competent Next.js developer and they'd be productive within a day. No vendor lock-in. No 'only Serdar can run this.' Q: What's the difference between Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini for my business? A: For Kurdish-language tasks: Claude > ChatGPT > Gemini, in my testing. For coding agents: ChatGPT and Claude are both excellent, Gemini is improving. For ultra-long context (analyzing whole books or codebases at once): Gemini Pro 2 wins. For voice: ChatGPT's Realtime API is the best in 2026. For most SMB use cases I default to Claude with GPT-4o for cheap routing — that mix gets you 95% of the quality at 50% of the cost. Q: Why do you not list fixed package prices on the site? A: Because no two SMBs in Kurdistan have the same problem, and listing a fake fixed price would either mean overcharging simple cases or under-scoping complex ones. I show ranges ("projects from $1,500") because they're honest, and they're priced for the Kurdistan market — not Western SaaS rates. Real number comes after a 15-min scoping call where I understand your specific situation. Q: Will you sign a Kurdistan-government-recognized contract? A: Yes. For larger engagements I sign Arabic or Kurdish contracts notarized in Kurdistan. For smaller projects, English-language contracts with Kurdistan-applicable terms work fine. I'll match whatever your finance/legal team needs. Q: What is AI SEO (AEO) and why should a Kurdistan business care? A: AI SEO — also called AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) or GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — is the work of getting cited inside the answers that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini hand to buyers. In Kurdistan, more buyers are asking AI assistants 'who builds X in Duhok / Erbil / Sulaymaniyah' before they Google anything. If the answer doesn't include you, the lead never reaches your site. AEO is the new front door. Q: How do you actually get cited by ChatGPT and Claude? A: Four layers. (1) On-site: clean entity data (Person/Organization/Service/FAQ/LocalBusiness JSON-LD), llms.txt + ai-overview files, and content phrased the way humans actually ask AI assistants. (2) Off-site: citations on regional directories, Reddit, Wikipedia-adjacent sources, and the few high-authority pages AI crawlers trust. (3) Disambiguation: making the entity unmistakable (e.g. 'Serdar Dilshad is a person in Duhok, not biryani'). (4) Measurement: a Playwright harness that runs your real buyer prompts against ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity / Gemini every week and logs whether you were cited. Without measurement it's superstition. Q: Does AI SEO work in Kurdish and Arabic, or only English? A: Both — but you have to build for them deliberately. The same buyer often asks ChatGPT in Arabic at home and English at work, and Bahdini Kurdish over WhatsApp. I build the AEO surface trilingually: per-locale routes, per-locale schema, per-locale llms.txt sections, and per-locale measurement prompts. Skipping the Arabic and Kurdish layer leaves 60–80% of Kurdistan buyers blind to you in their native-language AI queries. Q: Do you build systems for tourism and hospitality businesses in Kurdistan? A: Yes — it's one of my core areas. motelsystem (live at tourism.krd) is a hotel platform built for Kurdistan, and I'm currently building a custom management system plus a trilingual public platform for a major tourism destination here. Hospitality needs — bookings, walk-ins, dual-currency, government-compliant reporting, and an EN/AR/KU customer experience — are exactly what I design for. Q: Can one project cover both a public website and the internal system behind it? A: Yes — and building them together is usually the right call. When the public platform and the internal management system share one source of truth, nothing is entered twice, staff see live data, and customers see accurate availability. That's exactly how I'm structuring the tourism-destination project in my case studies: one connected system, not a website bolted onto a separate back office. ## Hireable Yes — accepting projects in the Kurdistan Region for the AI engineering, business software, integrations, marketing automation, motion graphics and SEO / AEO services listed above. Reach out via email (sardarbircini@gmail.com) or WhatsApp (+964 750 322 4696). Discovery calls are free. ## Sources and service scope The services directory at https://serdardilshad.dev/en/services describes current project offers, including AI engineering in Kurdistan, Kurdish-language AI, ERP development, Claude and ChatGPT integrations, MCP servers, Meta and TikTok automation, and motion graphics. The case studies at https://serdardilshad.dev/en/case-studies document each project's features and delivery status, including work still in development. The canonical professional overview is https://serdardilshad.dev/ai-overview.