Tally ERP 9 Customization for Your Business – a 5 Stage Process

Tally ERP 9 is a robust business management application capable of handling a wide array of business activities, ranging from accounting, financial control, and payroll management, to sales/receivables, statutory compliance, and inventory management. However, small and medium sized businesses seldom need all the features of this versatile ERP application. As a result, Tally ERP 9 customization is the key to meet the specific and unique business requirements of a particular firm.

Apart from being an end-to-end business management application, Tally ERP 9 is built to be a platform that can be extended to support Tally customization. Using a development language called Tally Definition Language (TDL), you can enhance or change the default behavior of Tally ERP 9 by extending its core functionality. Tally ERP 9 also supports ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) API and import & export of data in standard data formats like XML (Extensible Markup Language) & CSV (Comma Separated Values) format. Tally ERP 9 has a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) listener, which helps in online integration and with other business tools.

The following is a 5-stage process followed by your well-known Tally software solutions providers to successfully implement a Tally ERP 9 customization project that fits not only the current needs of your business but also is scalable in future:

1. Gathering and assessing business requirements: Understanding the scope and the finer nuances of the business that make it unique compared to others is key to achieving successful ERP customization within time. More often than not, solution providers understand what is required by the business; however, discussing what is not required by the business also brings greater clarity in defining the exact scope of the exercise.

2. Conceptualizing the elements that will achieve the goal: This phase requires the service provider to decide on the tools and design a strategy to meet the end objective of the client. This will include a detailed study of the existing version of Tally software been used by the client and defining the architecture, add-ons, components, modules, interfaces, and data that will need to be developed to fill the gap.

3. Development of add-ons, macros, and modules followed by pilot testing: This stage is the most critical and time consuming as it is here that all the elements defined in the previous stage are developed. Most common means of extending the use of stock application includes specific add-on plugins, macros, and full-fledged modules. The development and integration of these custom software elements is followed by meticulous pilot testing. Testing helps iron out all the variances of the system vis-à-vis its stated functionalities.

4. Live deployment and staff training: This stage involves Tally Integrator (TI) rolling out the developed solution to all business locations of the client. Another important aspect during this stage is training the client’s staff to work on the software application and address issues that they may face with regards to factors, such as custom invoice generation, payroll management, accounts management, managing inventory status, and generating MIS reports at multiple levels, among others.

5. Provision of post-implementation support: Expert and well-known Tally solutions specialist includes this as a part of their customization project because many a times, even though pilot testing goes smoothly, some issues arise during real-life deployment. As a result, support and maintenance during this stage is essential for the end client.

What Tally ERP 9’s E-Commerce Integration Means for Third-Party Online Sellers?

The retail landscape in India continues to witness drastic changes in the physical world as well as the online world. Firstly, there is a growing realization amongst brick-and-mortar stores to also have an online presence mainly led by the incremental growth experienced by the e-commerce sector. Secondly, the increasing number of online marketplaces (such as eBay, Amazon, Flipkart, and Snapdeal) means any business with reasonable access to the Internet can go online and expand sales channels without increasing its overheads.

To add to this, the growing access to affordable Smartphones and rising subscriptions to mobile Internet connections, the trend of shopping everything from apparel and groceries, to electronics and books online is here to stay. It is important to note that we haven’t yet reached the phase wherein physical point of sale (POS) stores is passé; however, having an online presence multiplies the seller’s exposure to their prospective buyers.

Common challenges faced by small third-party online sellers

From the perspective of a small retailer operating a physical store, the online marketplaces do open up a string of opportunities to increase profitability and expand their market; nevertheless, they bring the following set of challenges:-

1. Managing critical data coming from/going into multiple channels

All retailers who opt to sell online have a demanding task of managing colossal data coming from and going into multiple channels. It becomes difficult to manually manage hosts of excel sheets containing critical data pertaining to product details, orders, sales, inventory status, pricing, and discounts. For instance, imagine having to manually manage all the above data on web marketplaces, including eBay, Amazon, Flipkart, and Snapdeal in addition to the same data from physical POS operations.

2. Syncing and integrating physical POS and online business data

Bi-directional consolidation of inventory and order data across all the sales channels is extremely important aspect yet very difficult to manage manually. To achieve this, it requires syncing and integrating supply-side and order-side data across all physical and virtual stores.

3. Getting real-time visibility of your transactions

Another challenge for small retailers venturing into the e-commerce scene is to get a real-time update of everything happening across all the stages of the supply chain from the time the order is placed online by the customer to coordinating with the warehouse for timely delivery and fulfillment.

A glance at Tally ERP 9’s integration capabilities

Tally ERP 9 is not only versatile business accounting, finance, and inventory management application; it has robust integration capabilities that provide businesses a customized Tally application that suits their need. This application communicates with the external world mainly using two interfaces: Tally ODBC interface and Tally XML interface.

Tally ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) interface makes it possible to access data from any application, regardless of which database management system (DBMS) is handling the data. This makes possible two-way data transfer between external database applications and Tally ERP database.

Using Tally XML interface, Tally software can communicate with any environment capable of sending and receiving XML over HTTP. This means Tally can act as an HTTP Server capable of receiving an XML Request and responding with an XML Response. The entire Tally data can be made available to the requesting application. On the other hand, using the same interface Tally can interact with a web service delivering data over HTTP. In this scenario, Tally behaves as a client retrieving and storing data into an external database. The web service capable of handling Tally Request/Response serves as a layer between Tally and external database.

These integration capabilities make possible Tally-to-Tally; Tally-to-external applications; and Tally-to-web services data synchronization possible.

What this means for online retailers?

For online retailers, this means their web-based e-commerce management applications can be integrated with Tally ERP 9 and Tally Shoper 9 which are used to manage their POS store inventory data. Many experienced Tally Integrators (TI) provide services in which they leverage the power of Tally ODBC or Tally XML interface as a bridge to synchronize data between their web marketplace stores (such as eBay, Amazon, and Flipkart) and Tally ERP 9.

By integrating Tally with online web store management applications, the retailers can constantly track their inventory data and purchase orders without having to go back to the dated spread sheets (for each sales channel) and manually update them. To cite an example, all the product, pricing, and inventory data on Tally ERP 9 can be synced with the online store application whilst the customer orders and invoices received on the online stores can be synced with Tally ERP 9. This bi-directional data associativity gives real-time business intelligence to retailers and provides them predictability to scale their operations sustainably.