How Salahiya Works: The Complete Guide to UAE HR Compliance (2026)

Salahiya (صلاحية — "validity") is a UAE-focused HR compliance platform that tracks every expiring document for every employee: residence visa, Emirates ID, labour card, passport and health card. This guide walks through exactly how it works — from sign-up to the first email alert — and what changes between Free, Starter and Pro.

If you'd rather see the visual version with screenshots of each screen, jump to the How it works page.

The problem Salahiya solves

UAE residence visas typically run on 2–3 year cycles. Emirates IDs follow the same schedule. Labour cards have a separate MOHRE workflow. Even a 15-person company has 60+ expiry dates per year to track. Miss one and you pay:

AED 50 per day in visa overstay fines
AED 500 per month in MOHRE labour-card penalties
AED 20 per day (capped at AED 1,000) for Emirates ID
Plus knock-on effects on the company file and future renewals

Most teams track all of this in a shared Excel sheet that no one really owns. Salahiya replaces the spreadsheet with a system that watches every date for you and emails the right person at the right moment.

1. Sign-up and the 2-day free trial

Sign up at salahiya.app/auth with email/password or Google. You enter your company name, choose your trade-licence emirate and your role — Salahiya provisions a workspace and starts your 2-day free trial. No credit card is required.

During the trial you can add up to 2 employees with full access to every feature on your tier (you start on Free by default). After 2 days the workspace locks until you upgrade or downgrade to Free permanently.

2. The compliance dashboard

The dashboard is the screen you'll spend the most time on. It has three layers:

Compliance Health Score — a single number (0–100) showing how on-top of renewals you are.
Action Center — tabbed view of Expired, Next 7 days, Next 30 days. Documents are grouped by employee so you can read it the way you think about it: "Ahmed needs three things renewed", not "three documents need renewing".
6-month forecast chart — when renewals cluster, you'll see the wall coming before you hit it.

3. Adding employees

You add employees one of three ways:

Manually — type the name, employee reference, visa type (dropdown of 11 UAE visa categories including Golden Visa, Employment, Investor, Dependant and more — plus "Other" for edge cases), and the expiry dates.
OCR scanner (Starter & Pro) — drag in a photo or PDF of the Emirates ID, residence visa or labour card. Salahiya reads it on-device using Tesseract with UAE-specific parsers (Emirates ID 784-YYYY-XXXXXXX-X format, GDRFA/ICP visa stamps, MOHRE labour card layouts). The form pre-fills. You confirm and save.
CSV import (Starter & Pro) — upload a spreadsheet. The parser auto-detects YYYY-MM-DD, DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY date formats, runs Zod validation on every row and surfaces row-level errors in plain English ("Row 7: Emirates ID expiry is missing").

4. Automatic email alerts

This is the feature most users come for. A daily cron worker runs at 08:00 UAE time and checks every document against your alert thresholds (defaults: 90, 60, 30, 14, 7 and 1 day before expiry — fully editable in Settings).

When a document crosses a threshold, Salahiya creates an in-app notification and sends a branded email from notify.salahiya.app. You also get:

A daily digest consolidating the day's alerts into one email at 08:00 UAE.
A weekly forecast emailed Monday at 08:00 UAE — a 90-day look-ahead, grouped by employee, so leadership can plan.

For the underlying paperwork these alerts cover, see our Emirates ID status guide, UAE visa renewal guide and labour card renewal guide.

5. Hybrid document storage (Starter & Pro)

When you upload the original files — passport scans, Emirates ID photos, visa pages — they don't go to Salahiya's servers. They go to your own database. Salahiya stores only an encrypted connection reference.

That gives you:

Data residency — your sensitive ID documents stay under your control.
GDPR / UAE PDPL alignment by design — Salahiya never holds the source files.
A clean exit — disconnect anytime and your files remain in your database, untouched.

6. Team accounts and roles

Salahiya replaces email-invite tokens with direct account creation. As an admin you create a staff account from Settings → Team; the staff member receives a password-setup email, sets their password and lands on the dashboard.

Seat caps per plan:

Plan	Admins	Staff	Employees
Free	1	0	2
Starter	2	3	10
Pro	5	5	50

On Pro you also get a dynamic permission matrix: toggle each capability (add employees, edit, delete, export, scan, etc.) on or off per role. The matrix is enforced server-side, not just in the UI.

7. PDF reports

Four one-click report types, branded with your company logo:

Expiring — documents expiring in the next 30 days, grouped by employee.
Expired — documents past expiry, grouped by employee.
Employee roster — full headcount with current document statuses.
Compliance summary — company-level overview suitable for management or auditors.

All reports are also available as CSV.

8. Billing in AED

Stripe handles payments in AED. Upgrade or downgrade any time — proration is invoiced immediately and your credit balance shows on your profile. The current pricing on salahiya.app/pricing:

Free — AED 0, 2-day trial, then locked.
Starter — AED 150 / month.
Pro — AED 350 / month.

No refunds, no per-document fees, no seat add-ons. The seat counts above are the actual product limits.

9. Security and audit

Row-level security on every table — no tenant ever sees another tenant's data.
Database functions hardened with pinned search paths.
HIBP leaked-password protection on sign-in.
Reauthentication via 6-digit email code for password changes, email changes and account deletion.
Full audit log of every change — who did what, when, on which employee.

10. Which plan should you pick?

If you have 1–2 employees and want to test the flow → Free, then decide in 48 hours.
If you have 3–10 employees and want OCR + CSV + reports → Starter.
If you have 10–50 employees, multiple HR staff and need granular role permissions → Pro.

Get started

Sign up at salahiya.app/auth — 2 minutes from landing to your first compliance dashboard. Browse the visual how-it-works page if you'd rather see screenshots first, or read more on UAE compliance in the blog.