Dubai
Ayaan Mandelia
I’m 15, and I finished the ACCA this year, the youngest ACCA Affiliate to do it. It was never about accounting. It was a means to an end, a way to be taken seriously, to prove something to myself, and to leave school on my own terms. Most of my week now goes to my family’s group in Dubai, AANKA, on reporting, websites and AI tools. The rest goes to the thing I don’t think a machine will ever do for me. Taste.
- ACCA Affiliate
- Completed at 15
- 80 / 75
- AFM · SBL
- 7
- AANKA businesses
- Sep 2025
- Working since
Rebuilding decovibesdubai.com, a portfolio-led site for the group’s interiors company.
The Oxford Brookes result. The research project went in this May.
AI systems, agents and automations, mostly in Claude Code.
Off Script. The first pieces are shot, more to come.
The ACCA, finished at 15
I started the ACCA in November 2024 and completed the qualification this year, at 15, making me the youngest ACCA Affiliate to have done it. I passed every Strategic Professional exam at the first attempt, 80% in Advanced Financial Management and 75% in Strategic Business Leader, and also completed Strategic Business Reporting and Advanced Audit and Assurance. My mother and father are both chartered accountants and former Big Four, so I had good people to ask.
Alongside it I took the Oxford Brookes BSc (Hons) in Applied Accounting. The research project went in this May; the result is still to come. I left Jumeirah College part-way through Year 10, in March 2026, to do this full time.
- Advanced Financial Management
- 80%
- Strategic Business Leader
- 75%
- Strategic Professional papers
- All first attempt
- Oxford Brookes BSc
- Result pending
Seven businesses, one week at a time
My family’s group has been running since 2014 across food, beauty and wellness, interiors and construction. That’s Khau Galli, House of Zaika, three Cutting Edge salons and a spa, DecoVibes and AANKA Contracting. Since September 2025 I’ve worked across it, mostly tracking and reporting the numbers, and increasingly the digital and brand side.
Sep 2025 – present · Dubai & Sharjah
Websites and brand work
I build and host the group’s sites, and support the brand and digital-presence work around them. Right now that means rebuilding DecoVibes as a dark, portfolio-led site, keeping aankagroup.com running, and this site. I work in Next.js with Claude Code, and read a lot more design than I write code.
decovibesdubai.com · aankagroup.com · this site
A thousand menu items, standardised
I reviewed and cleaned roughly 900–1,000 menu items across the restaurant branches and the delivery platforms, finding duplicates, pricing mismatches and availability gaps. Tedious, and the sort of thing that quietly breaks a business if nobody does it.
Nightly reporting, and an accounting prototype
Two things run on a schedule. A nightly sales report for the restaurants that pulls from the POS and posts the numbers to WhatsApp, and the same idea for the salons. Separately, I designed and tested a QuickBooks-focused workflow that reads invoices, allocates them to a branch, flags duplicates and adds review controls. It’s a prototype, not a rollout.
Filming the work as it happens
Off Script is the account I make about the actual work, what I’m building, what broke, what the exams were really like. Documentary rather than advice. The first piece was filmed in June. More are on the way.
@ayaan.offscript↗Two weeks between Nice and Milan
Two weeks in July. Nice as a base, then Milan. Èze, Villefranche, Cannes, Antibes, Monaco, Saint-Tropez, and Lake Como on the way back out. I turned 15 while we were in Monaco. Milan was mostly Brera and the Quadrilatero d’Oro, which is a polite way of saying it was mostly shops.
The part I can’t automate
I’ll be honest and call it a hobby, but I think it’s the most valuable thing I have. As AI takes the technical work (accounting, admin, the middle of most jobs), taste is what appreciates. Mine isn’t quiet or minimal. It’s dark, warm-lit, maximalist but disciplined. Think the register of the Sabyasachi store, jewel colours, ornament everywhere, nothing pale. I buy cheap clothes because I don’t like repeating outfits, and spend real money on shoes because I do repeat those. I want scale that calms you rather than shouts. The Burj Al Arab feeling, expansive but grounding. And I can tell you exactly what I hate, which is usually the faster route to what I like.
- Sabyasachi
- Christian Louboutin
- LV × Murakami
- Burj Al Arab
- Couture, not marketing
The boring things first
Most of what I’ve done at AANKA is unglamorous. Matching prices across delivery apps, agreeing one version of a menu, making a report send itself so nobody has to ask. None of it is clever. But you cannot improve a number you cannot see, and almost every interesting problem I’ve been handed turned out to be a boring problem underneath.
More notes →- Jul 2026ACCA Affiliate, at 15.
- Jun 2026Sat the final ACCA papers. Filmed the first Off Script piece.
- May 2026Submitted the Oxford Brookes research project. Result still pending.
- Mar 2026Left Jumeirah College part-way through Year 10 to work and study full time.
- Sep 2025Began working across AANKA Group, on reporting, digital and brand.