If you were born in the 80s or 90s, chances are that someone would have recommended taking a Tally tutorial class in order to secure a job in accounting. Even though the recommendations to take Tally classes have diminished over time, Tally Solutions, the popular accounting software, has managed to stay relevant and competitive in the ever-evolving technological landscape. 

Tally Solutions, established in 1986, is leveraging emerging technologies such as cloud, data analytics and AI/ML to bring the best version of their products to the customer.

“The focus on technology and innovation has kept Tally ahead of its time and leading from the front with the adoption of technologies relevant to our customers – be it DOS to Windows, LAN adoption in MSME sector, or the best UI for transactional system etc,” said Anjina Murthy, director – technology, Tally Solutions, in an exclusive interview with Analytics India Magazine.

AI & Analytics to the Rescue 

Tally is utilising data analytics in two distinct ways. First, to run a smoother organisation, and second, to improve the product and services offered by Tally. 

With programmes such as ‘Voice of Customers’ and ‘Customer Centricity’, Tally reaches out to its customers at least once in a quarter to gauge their problems and study their behaviours. “Data collected through this is fed as an input during design and solution of a particular feature/module. Besides, Tally also has a customer health index concept to get feedback and improve customer experiences,” Murthy said.

He also believes that technologies such as AI/ML have significant potential in the SME segment. “For example, catalogue and directories services provided within the Tally product would bring a whole lot of changes in the way transition entries would be happening.”

“On the support side, we use AI-driven chatbots to respond to our customer’s queries. This is still in early stages, where the knowledge base is gradually being built to become more comprehensive. Most of the enterprise systems are hosted on cloud. To manage all this, we have a dedicated IT team,” Murthy said. 

Tally on Cloud 

Tally, despite being a legacy on-premise product, is using the cloud to offer services to customers and run its backend systems. “We do offer e-Invoice, e-waybill, SYNC, and other connected services within the product, for which we have hosted our backend on the cloud.”

Bengaluru-headquartered firm Tally has also recognised the challenges of maintaining cloud systems and data, and the significant investment required from IT. “Our aim is to provide a solution that allows for easy access to data anytime, anywhere, without customers having to worry about technical issues,” said Murthy. 

“Whether they choose to keep their data on their device (such as laptop/computer), their office servers (in a single LAN, or distributed LAN/WAN, or their own IDC), or our service, or even at more than one location, they will ‘magically’ get continuous access, with ‘magical’ consistency and reliability of information.”

Withstanding the Test of Time

Tally Solutions accounts for nearly 75% market share in the business software market for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

It has managed to stay at the top of the game because it has always put customer’s problems first and never been constrained by technology. Over the years, it has continuously re-looked at many aspects of the product.

Further, Tally has also developed its own database, language – Tally Definition Language (TDL), UI engine, interpreters, parsers, data types –all of which are specially designed to handle business domain problems. “We also have TallyPrime Server, which provides concurrency to handle a greater number of users. This provides read-read concurrency and read-write concurrency at record level allowing a reasonably good number of multi-user support,” shared Murthy, saying that they have done it in the past and will continue to re-factor, re-write and never hesitate to write things from scratch.

“We have always pushed ourselves and continuously innovated many things over the years. We take pride in calling ourselves a technology company rather than a fintech company,” Murthy said.

Many of Tally’s customers have been with the company since its early days. “Having a product with more than thirty years of expertise, it becomes critical to make sure that the quality gets better with each release, and the earlier things continue to work the same way or better.”

Murthy stresses that Tally understands the way an MSME runs its day-day business. “We continuously take insights from them, to improve and adapt to make our product better. We will soon have a feature-rich GST product release that will make compliance for customers much easier, both offline and online,” shared Murthy. 

Plans are afoot to extend the integration capabilities of Tally products by incorporating a few more standard formats and protocols like EXCEL, JSON, and REST. “We will be releasing a rich set of connected services in the areas of compliance, communication, and financial services. The next big thing being worked upon is the ‘next generation connected platform’. This will change the way businesses use technology,” Murthy concluded.