INDIA INNOVATES

TALLYING WELL

Tally is unrivalled in accounting software for small enterprises in India. It is now trying to replicate that phenomenon in ERP for larger enterprises

Sujit John TNN

In some ways, Tally Solutions is India's Microsoft. Its accounting software is as ubiquitous amongst India's micro, small and medium enterprises as Microsoft's Windows is amongst...just about everybody. In both cases, most users in India use pirated versions. Tally is as easy to set up and simple to use as Windows or Word is; which explains why you find firms advertising for "receptionists with Tally knowledge".
But there the similarities end. Though Tally says it has users in over 100 countries, the bulk of its estimated 2-3 million users are in India. So Tally is a long way from becoming the global success that Indian software service exporters have been, let alone the success that Microsoft has been in software products. Yet, at the moment, Tally looks to be the one Indian software product company that has the best chance of becoming truly India's Microsoft.
Over the past few years, it has transformed the simple book keeping system that it started off with 24 years ago, and has now entered a realm that has been the forte of the likes of SAP and Oracle -- ERP targeted at larger enterprises. And it says it has applied the same basic principles of ease of use and implementation that made its early accounting software such a rage among small businesses.
Unlike traditional ERP solutions that could take more than one-and-a-half years to implement and become operational, Tally says its ERP can become operational in a month. "It's plug-and-play ERP. Customization can happen as you go along. Our software is flexible, so it takes the shape you want it to, just like our first software did," says Shoaib Ahmed, one of the five presidents in Tally Solutions and who came into Tally six years ago when Tally bought out his accounting software company.
Bharat Goenka, who co-founded the company along with his father Shyam Sunder Goenka in 1986, says only about 10,000 of India's 200,000 large enterprises today use ERP. "Nobody, including those like SAP, is designing ERP to get the entire 200,000 as customers. All ERP vendors together may be planning for another 10,000. We, on the contrary, are designing and engineering our product to get the entire market," he says. Ahmed says Goenka has mandated his team to get 150,000 large enterprises as customers in five years. His expression suggests that's an impossible order. It's a pace that SAP or Oracle cannot even dream of. But Goenka has done it before in a different market segment, so maybe it's not so impossible after all.

The vision

From inception, Tally's driving force has been ease of use. It started in the mid-80s when the Goenkas tried to run some accounting software that the likes of Wipro and TCS were selling then. For the simplest of applications, it required them to know numerous commands, making the senior Goenka to remark: "When I buy a car, I want to drive it, not be a mechanic." And since his son was interested in programming, he was asked to work on a better solution.
"After four months, we showed our first demos to my father. There was a payment for travelling expenses with the entry code 'T001'. My father couldn't understand the need for codes, and we told him the computer does not understand English, it only understands codes, and it's easier to write programmes with codes. To that my father asked: are you writing programmes to make the life of the programmer easier or the life of the user easier?" They went back to the drawing board, and eventually came out with what was the first 'codeless accounting' software.
"That became our benchmark. My father would try something, and if he couldn't do it without me standing behind him, it had to be redone. That put a different discipline into us," says Bharat Goenka.
It also meant that the software was highly customized to the way India's businesses did accounting, which was far less disciplined than in developed markets. If a store was to issue a purchase order for 100 shirts, but only 75 were delivered, software solutions designed for developed markets could not handle it. "You would have to send the delivery back saying my system cannot handle it. But Tally could handle such exceptions, and businesses liked that because they would want to take the delivery and start selling the shirts that had come," says Ahmed.
Similarly, any wrong entry made that affected many other entries could be corrected in traditional software only by making an additional entry. Tally allowed you to correct the original, which was the way accountants functioned. Dates could be entered any which way, books of accounts could be presented the way you wanted. "Traditional softwares were straitjacketed, they could not handle exceptions. But life is about exceptions, especially for unorganized business," says Ahmed.
That same philosophy, Tally says, informed all later applications, like for inventory accounting and management, multi-location/multi-currency/multi-unit handling, payroll accounting, budgets and controls, taxes.

A comprehensive solution

Today, Tally has a comprehensive, integrated solution, covering multiple aspects of an enterprise. And over the past two years, it has also built the capability to deploy the solution in multiple locations, consolidate data and access data from remote locations or on the move. It allows your chartered accountant to audit your accounts from his office, it allows you to deal with your bank and your dealers through the system. And it can handle hundreds, even thousands of users, unlike the early ones that worked best with no more than ten. In the coming months, newer, more powerful, versions are expected.
The early indication from enterprises is that they like what they are seeing. "The simplicity and usability of Tally. ERP 9 won our hearts. Considering that most of our staff members were not technology experts, the simplicity of Tally ERP gave it an edge over competitors like SAP," says Sanjeev Nigam, finance manager in home appliance company Maharaja Whiteline Industries. A big recent win for Tally has been Tata DoCo-Mo, which is using the solution to track its product movement at its distributor and retail locations. "Such tracking was key to the success of our business. A big differentiator for Tally was that it is ubiquitously used and hence, there was a greater acceptance to it from our distributor community," says Shirish Munj, VP for IT in Tata Teleservices.
Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst in Gartner, says Tally is today recognized around the world. "People overseas looking to enter India have often asked me about Tally. It's a brand to reckon with. But there will be stiff challenges from the mega vendors when Tally tries to serve large enterprises. They will need a highly comprehensive offering, and I'm not sure they have it fully yet," Raina says.