If you're Muslim, you probably know the feeling. At some point you missed prayers, maybe for months or years, and now you want to make them up (qaza). The hard part isn't praying them. It's keeping count.

I tried a note on my phone, then a spreadsheet, then a paper tally. All of them broke the same way: I'd forget to update them, and after a few weeks I had no idea what the real number was. So I built a simple namaz and qaza tracker into my site, Yaad-e-Namaz.

What it does

  • Tick each namaz as you pray it, five a day.
  • Missed ones turn into qaza automatically. You don't have to remember to add them.
  • Make-ups count down. Every qaza you pray brings the total down, so you can actually see progress.
  • Start from an estimate. Most people don't know their exact number, so you can enter a rough starting count and work from there.
  • Reminders on WhatsApp. This turned out to be the feature people care about most. A notification on a prayer app is easy to swipe away. A WhatsApp message from a contact feels like someone checking in. More on that here: WhatsApp namaz reminders.

The core idea is tiny

Under the hood, it's just a counter per prayer:

const PRAYERS = ['fajr', 'zuhr', 'asr', 'maghrib', 'isha']; // at the end of each day, anything not ticked becomes qaza function closeDay(day, qaza) { for (const p of PRAYERS) { if (!day[p]) qaza[p] += 1; } return qaza; } // praying a make-up brings the count down function prayQaza(qaza, p) { qaza[p] = Math.max(0, qaza[p] - 1); return qaza; }

The real work was everything around it: making the daily tick take one tap, keeping counts per prayer instead of one big number (Fajr is usually the one people miss most), and making the total feel motivating instead of guilt-inducing.

A few design choices

Per-prayer counts, not one total. "You owe 1,200 prayers" is crushing. "You have 240 Fajr left" is something you can plan around.

A simple routine. A common suggestion is to pray one qaza with each daily prayer, so five a day. At that pace the counter visibly drops every week, which keeps people going.

Privacy first. This is personal. The data is private to your account, there are no ads, and you can delete your account any time.

No account needed for everything else. Prayer times, Qibla, the Quran and hadith all work without signing in. You only need an account for the tracker and WhatsApp reminders, because those have to remember things about you.

Try it

It's free: yaadenamaz.com/account. If you've built habit trackers before, I'd love to hear what worked for you. And if you use it, tell me what's annoying so I can fix it.