Keeping Tally as the ledger and moving operations off it

• Month-end closes slowly because spreadsheets must be reconciled to Tally first.
• The working production plan, rate card or project costing lives in a single file that one person owns.
• Every branch runs a separate Tally company, and head office adds the totals manually.
• Add-ons bought for different jobs share no data.
• A new joiner needs a tour of several files to learn where a figure comes from.

1. Map what runs today. List the spreadsheets, the Tally add-ons and the approvals that happen on WhatsApp. These are the system being replaced.
2. Decide what Tally keeps. In most cases the statutory books and the GST returns. Settling this first gives the project a fixed edge.
3. Build operations first. Planning, stock, costing and approvals carry the value. Posting to accounts is quicker and comes later.
4. Reuse the TDL as a list. Custom TDL changes show what Tally could not do on its own. Read them as requirements instead of porting them.
5. Run in parallel for one full month-end. Both systems produce the same figures, checked line by line, before anyone signs off.
6. Cut over one unit at a time, with a rollback plan written before go-live.

The ERP sends entries to Tally as XML over HTTP. Tally has no message queue, so the integration holds each entry until Tally confirms it, and retries when Tally is closed or busy. Masters such as items, parties and cost centres move across after cleaning. Transaction history normally stays in Tally, where your auditors expect it.

• You run a single trading unit, and the few spreadsheets you have are uncontested.
• Your process matches a packaged industry ERP, which will then be quicker to adopt.
• The only gap is reporting. A reporting layer over Tally costs less than a platform.
• No one in your company will own the new system for the next year.

A steel processing group replaced five disconnected systems with one modular ERP. The case page gives the figures.

Related: custom ERP or SAP, spreadsheets to a platform, the custom ERP service.