Tally.ERP 9 - Overview

You bank and pay utility bills from home, why not do your business accounts? Or call up a stock status report and print a copy from wherever you are? Tally.ERP 9 has been designed with you in mind. Powerful connectivity makes information available with your staff, CA and other professionals, round-the-clock, in any place. It's also quick to install and allows incremental implementation-a novel capability that lets you activate just as many of its functions when required, even across locations.

At Tally, we have a hard-earned reputation for empowering businesses with stable, effective software products and Tally.ERP 9 takes this further. Tally.ERP 9 has all the features required for high-performance business management including remote access, audit & compliance services, an integrated support centre and security management, all focused on delivering peace of mind. It is a complete product that retains its original simplicity yet offers evolved capabilities like statutory processes, payroll, excise etc. Whatever the demands, Tally.ERP 9 makes life a lot easier. With an ideal combination of function, control and customisability built in, Tally.ERP 9 permits business owners and their associates to do more.

Advantages of Tally.ERP 9:

• Powerful remote capabilities that boost collaboration
• Easy to find qualified personnel
• Easy to customise
• Low cost of ownership via quick implementation, Tally Integrator, Support Centre…

Functions & Features:

Accounting

All your accounting requirements are supported. And more. Accounting, also known as bookkeeping, is the recording and classifying of financial transactions into the books of accounts and associated registers.

Let us look at the some of the 'needs' for which businesses maintain books of accounts:

• To fulfill legal requirements - records as per standards and practices
• To pay taxes to various bodies - statutory needs
• Keep the business running - manage receivables & payables, cash, bank...
• Keep a watch on the pulse of the organisation - key performance indicators
• Respond to queries - to locate the right transaction immediately

We have been perfecting this 'simple' recording - accounting - from over twenty years. All this to deliver better, faster and more flexible ways to fulfill your needs, not just maintain books of accounts. A few examples will illustrate:

• With the entry of a voucher (this is what we call all accounting transactions) all books of  accounts, all reports, all totals & sub-totals are updated instantly. There is nothing more that  needs to be done - whether you are inserting a forgotten entry, or correcting one
• Taxation requirements of all the states of India are available, in the prescribed formats
• Supporting tasks like reminder letters, delayed interest, ageing, bank reconciliation
• One single dashboard to look at all important business ratios
• Drill down from any report, even the Balance Sheet, right to any voucher or filter and search
• Data entry in the language of the users choice - and report in any other language (from the  languages supported)
• Mark vouchers that are draft as 'optional' and convert these to final- with one button click

Financial Management & Controls

Tally.ERP 9 comes with rich features & financial reports that give you the necessary management and control of your business. A few of these are listed below:

• Funds Flow & Cash Flow reports – help you locate bottlenecks

• Bank reconciliation - keeps your bank books in sync, and identify unclear instruments

• Customer Credit Limits - to limit risk of default and large losses

• Budgets - keep tabs on projected expenses against actuals

• Mark vouchers post dated - these will reflect into the books of accounts only on/after that date

• For needs where reports have to consider a transaction that has not happened (say salaries  for this month that get paid the next month) vouchers (called 'reversing journals') can be  marked to 'disappear' for reports post a specific date

• "Scenario" management - helps you with your business forecasting and planning. You can use  optional, reversing journals and memorandum vouchers, to aid in recording provisional entries  that are useful for interim reports

• Multiple inventory valuation. You can decide one valuation method for the business, and be  able generate financial reports using any other valuation method - as the statutory method may  not be appropriate for your needs, your bankers and for other decisions
• Cash balances can go negative - you can get warned if this is about to happen, or see reports  and make the necessary corrections

• Several business exceptions are available (negative stocks, negative ledgers) - for you to  exercise control over these activities

• A one-screen business ratios with drill down right up to the transactions - help you to correct  course frequently

• Item wise & document wise profitability statements to control revenue leakage and  inappropriate pricing

• Internal audits are supported with audit controls - authorised users can mark vouchers as   'audited' and can get to see reports on changes made post audit, and the name of the person  making the change

Inventory Accounting & Management

If you deal in goods, of any type, you'll appreciate the Inventory capabilities in Tally.ERP 9.

You can comprehensively record all types of inventory transactions, using goods receipt notes, delivery notes, stock journals, manufacturing journals and physical stock journals. All stock movements are fully recorded and maintained in stock registers.

Developed for all manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers or traders a small list of features are briefly described below:

Manufacturers:

• Bill of materials and Manufacturing Journals, to record material conversions
• Compound bill of materials support, for units that contain assemblies
• Multiple locations (godowns)
• Excise for manufacturers, including all documentation and invoice
• Costing for jobs

Distributors & Wholesalers:

• Multiple price lists, with effective dates of applicability
• Use multiple units of measure (say KG's & grams)
• Dual units of measure (say KG's and bags, to support variations as happens in commodities)

Traders:

• High speed billing, with support for POS printers
• Bar code support
• Automatic application of taxes
• Service billing & service tax
• Integrated sales return in bills
• Print bills (and any other document) in the customers language

Common:

• You can choose to de-link the computed inventory value to automatically appear in your  financial statements - and enter this figure manually.
• Stock ageing reports, to identify slow and non-moving stocks
• Invoice profitability reports to keep a pulse on sales
• Multi-currency transactions - buy and sell across the world - with integrated forex gain/loss  calculations
• Physical stock take records to adjust physical vs. actual stocks
• Maintain batch & expiry details

Purchases & Payables: from Order to Payment

Tally.ERP 9 delivers the entire purchase cycle whether the need is the complete purchase order - goods receipt - rejections & returns - advances, debits & payments or a single payment entry, fulfilling all needs.

To ensure that you have the right stocks and minimize carrying costs, Tally.ERP 9 delivers the following to improve purchase orders:

• Define Re-order levels as a definite number or based on consumption
• Define minimum quantity to order as a definite number or based on consumption
• Pull up a report that shows the stock position, including complete details of open purchase
  orders, sales orders that need to be fulfilled - check on past purchase history, and then place
  orders
• Optionally stagger delivery dates in the PO

When receiving goods:

• Make entries in accordance with supporting documentation, including errors your suppliers  could have made (say of multiplication & round off)
• Incorporate additional costs
• Automatically manage input taxes
• Flexibility allows receipt of goods, quantities and rates different from that ordered - since  this is common in real life
• Record samples & free items (using different 'actual' & 'billed' quantities)
• Multiple receipts for one order or one receipt for multiple orders, or against verbal orders

In case there is a need to add other costs (say coolie and cartage) these additional charges can be apportioned to the cost of goods purchased.

Supplied goods may not match your needs and these are managed by the 'Rejections Out' inventory voucher. Supplier dues, input taxes and inventory positions are updated.

Suppliers often indicate likely profits, which may not be met. In case such assurances are made, you can look at Item profitability reports, and get the facts right. You could then negotiate a rebate and record this as a debit note.

Keep tabs of how much is due to whom, when. Manage advances, payables & post dated checks. Ensure there are no errors in payments - print checks from Tally.ERP 9.

Sales & Receivables: from Order to Receipt

The lifeline of a business, efficiencies in sales operations, both of goods & services, directly impact growth and profitability. The need to optimise and keep a close watch here requires exceptional capabilities from your business IT system - and Tally.ERP 9 meets these demands.

The sales process is supported with the following documents:

• Quotations - records of quotes
• Sales orders - accepted customer orders
• Deliver Notes - documents that accompany goods
• Sales Invoices/Cash Bill - to record the sale
• Credit Notes - for financial adjustments
• Rejections in - for goods returns
• Receipts - for advances and receipts

Do you have cash sales (sales across the counter)? With support for Point of Sale printers, bar codes and receipts in multiple tenders, you POS enable your business at no additional cost. Product sales may come with added services - and the integrated product & service billing will close this.

Enforce credit limits, where needed. Along with the Payment Performance of Debtors report you can identify persistent problems and take necessary business decisions. Interest for delays & reminder letters aid in collection.

For businesses engaged in Excisable goods, you get full support for Excise for Traders & Manufacturing Excise - matter of fact a business could be both!

Make multiple deliveries from one order, or one from multiple orders – this common need is available across all documents of the sales process.

Do you have multiple classes of customers? You can easily setup multiple prices (even in advance and specify the date from which they are effective).

Discounts against the line, or for the document, additional charges as a percentage or lump sum, automatic round off of bill totals, automatic computation of VAT & Service tax, returns & exchanges are all available.

Need to verify that you are making the desired sales margins? Item wise and bill wise profitability reports will help you keep tabs.

Multi-company

A set of account books represents a 'company' in Tally.ERP 9. Therefore, if you decide to maintain your personal accounts you would create a 'company'. Many businesses do have more than one legal entity - and so will require multi-company support. Since each company is a distinct ‘data base', building technical support for this is not difficult.

However, with multiple companies, several needs often arise beyond the mere facility to record transactions that need to be addressed,.

Principally, you would like to look at consolidated reports since these are often more meaningful to you than statutory reports of each company individually. You can therefore 'group' companies and have the reporting ability as if this were a 'company'. You could also 'group' these on demand or as required. So Partner A, could group companies in which he is a partner (say Companies P, Q & R) and Partner B could have a group with Companies Q, R & Y.

With multiple companies, you would probably need to compare them to see relative figures. In Tally.ERP 9, while seeing a report for Company P, you could pull up another column alongside that shows figures from Company Q (and any more companies). You can now continue to drill down the report and continue to see these comparisons.

Quiet often with multiple companies, the need arises to create the same ledgers & post transactions to more than one company. This can be accomplished with the click of a few keys - you save immense time by not having to re-enter data and avoid data entry errors.

In special circumstances, where there are needs like a Purchase Order entry becoming a Sales Order in another company, our Service Partners will be able to work with you, understand specific requirements and build a solution around the Data Synchronisation capability.

Security: With multiple companies, possibly including personal accounts, you may need to control who gets access to which companies, and to do what. You can set up users, grant or deny access - and these are defined for each company.

Remote Access: You choose to specify which company is accessible remotely. You choose which remote users have access; you decide what access a remote user gets.

Central User Management: Users come and go. You might also have a password policy requiring users to change passwords every few weeks. You can take advantage of the ease of central user and password management that Tally.NET identities carry - and even remotely manage these while not in office.

Multi-Period

A 'financial year' is truly suited to business reporting and statutory needs. In reality, business spans across financial years, so ‘real needs' get constrained by these financial periods.

As an example, receivables (Sundry Debtors) is an area that is frequently plagued by 'confusion' - the need to send reminders, resend statements of accounts and persistent follow up - may require that you need to look at figures from date 'x' to date ‘y' - and one or more financial periods can be between these two dates. With Tally.ERP 9, you can specify any date range and perform any operation that you need to.

Comparison of Periods, say Q2 this year vs. Q2 last year, often required for shareholder and statutory reporting are easily accomplished.

You may also need to break up periods into smaller chunks, instead of the 'year'. While looking at the reports, you can instantly view them broken into periods of your choice (daily, monthly, quarterly etc). For studying trends, locating unusual figures, or comparing activities for different periods, this is invaluable.

Take the case of budgets. Say for a five year long project - and for various ledgers you need to have a budget set up for five years, another for each year, another two that are 2 ½ years... you can setup such budgets, and compare budget vs. actual for any!

In effect you can 'zoom out' as well as 'zoom in' to any period of your choice.

Any changes made or a transaction inserted anytime, are instantly carried forward - no matter how far back these are made (from a security standpoint, you might need to restrict data entry or changes to transactions prior to a specific date - this is available via the User security control features).

Multi-Cost/Profit Centres

As a business transacting in multiple currencies, you will appreciate the effortless usability of Tally.ERP in this area.

Say, you make purchases from a supplier, and transact in a currency different (say $) from that of your base currency (say INR). You'd like to keep track of the dollars due, as well as the $ amounts due for each bill. This way you get to know your foreign currency requirements as well as cross check the accounts in $.

At the same time you would want to see outstanding and other financial reports in INR. Since this figure depends on the exchange rate as on the date of the report, generating these are time consuming. With Tally.ERP 9 all reports are generated automatically - all that is needed is that the forex rates be available for reference.

Foreign exchange gain & loss entries are 'posted' automatically (as a notional entry), whenever any report is taken. The day you decide to make these entries regular (say end of the financial year) you can post the required accounting Journal (with software assistance).

Importers and exporters maintain bank, customer & other accounts in foreign currencies (like the example of the supplier) - you can maintain these in any currency required.

As a branch or subsidiary of a foreign entity, or for reporting, you may need to generate reports in a currency other than the base, at some exchange rate. This capability is available across all reports.

You may need to compare companies having different base currencies - switch one company to use the currency of the other, or switch them both to a third!

Basically, every amount field in a Tally.ERP 9 voucher is multi-currency enabled. This allows you to conduct business in ways that manual systems permit and most IT systems fail to provide. It is possible for a supplier to, say, send a quote for items in INR, some in US$ and some in €.

Multi-units

Most businesses will use several units of measure, even if the belief that just one (pieces) is used.

Take purchases - you could order in the units you are comfortable with, and you receive goods in a different unit - for e.g., order in Pcs, receive in KG's. Similarly you could record sales in the units that your customer is comfortable with. The flexibility of this 'compound' unit of measures is to ensure that Tally.ERP 9 does not get in the way of your way of working. Like in the case of multi-currency, every quantity field is inherently multi-unit ready.

Some commodities, say cotton, have 'peculiar' problems - the unit of stock used for this commodity is 'bales', yet trade is in Kg's. With changes in weather, cotton looses or gains weight due to changes in moisture content. If you used Kg's for your records, you would loose the ability to manage stock count and stock take of bales; if you used bales, you would have a mismatch in the actual quantity transacted. This problem is compounded in real life – since each bale carries a different weight of cotton.

With Tally.ERP 9 you can manage all these, with the support for multiple units of measure. Now, you can record both units in transactions – Kg's and bales at the same time. Stock valuation will be done in Kg's; inventory count can be managed in bales!

You receive some supplies - the Invoice shows 5 Pcs. and the actual count shows 6 Pcs.! Were you to enter your receipt as 6 Pcs., there will be a mismatch with the voucher and physical document which will result in an audit objection. Entering as 5 Pcs. would mean that one piece is not recorded... Tally.ERP 9 supports 'actual' and 'billed' quantities - thus delinking the inventory count from the financial impact of the transaction. With this you can also receive and deliver free samples and manage the many variations that occur now and then.

Therefore compound units, alternate units and billed/actual quantities should deliver the capabilities needed for most, if not all, of your requirements.

Multi-Location Inventory

Even the simplest of organisations will have inventory in more than one physical location. As organisations get bigger, inventory will require active 'management' with more warehouses (godowns, as we call it in India), racks & shelves and stocks at project locations.

Take the case of multiple sales outlets, each with one godown. Each purchases items at different prices and sells them over time. You need to take a call on the value of stocks at each of these outlets as if they were independent units - and not apply the company average. With Tally.ERP 9, each outlet will act as an independent unit from a costing perspective. Sales from each outlet will reflect the appropriate cost, and not the company average (which can skew profitability of both outlets).

Seen at the company level, the cost behavior ignores these godowns - making reports and financial analysis appropriate at that level.

Godowns can contain godowns - to allow management to the bin level.

For various jobs (projects) and sub-jobs, the use of godowns and cost centres in Tally.ERP 9 give a high level of reporting and analysis - on inventory and financial aspects of jobs.

Multi-Budgets & Scenarios

Budgets are a measure of the results expected for the planned activities for a company. Whether you formally plan budgets or not, you will be working against several budgets – Revenue, Production, Expense, Financial, Investment and so on.

Once these budgets are recorded, you would periodically want to check up how your business measures up against this plan. And once you get a handle on the variance, you would probably take decisions on course corrections - record possible outcomes of these changes (as scenarios) and compare against the budgets once again.

This is a powerful planning mechanism that provides the flexibility to work in a changing /dynamic environment.

With Tally.ERP 9, you can set up any number of budgets - and to make this easy, budgets can roll up into 'group' budgets and these can roll up again into 'master' budgets: the people who come up with the budgets can make entries and the roll-up is automatic (and can be overridden at the rolled up level as well).

While viewing any report, you can choose to pull up the budgeted figures as well, along with a variance column. You could just as easily pull up budget figures alone – and make these available to various people.

A 'scenario' is the name given to a specific combination of vouchers that will be included to deliver a report - you can include and exclude different voucher types and build as many scenarios as needed – say one where a product launch is on time and another where it is delayed by three months. You could then view actual figures against a scenario. You could also see the variance between a scenario and the budget!

Budgets and Scenarios are powerful tools when used by themselves; used together they deliver unprecedented power to help plan & monitor your business.