Blogs · Manufacturing
When a factory should stop extending Tally
· 2 min read
Tally is the right book for GST and accounts. It becomes the wrong book when job cards, material, and costing live in registers beside it.
Tally is a serious accounts book. Most factories we meet already use it well for vouchers, GST, and the month-end that the accountant will sign. The trouble starts when the shop floor is asked to live inside the same book.
What Tally is for
Keep Tally for the ledger. Purchase, sales, tax, and the numbers that have to match a return belong there. A custom system that tries to replace that book usually recreates a worse one.
The factory still needs a different record for the work itself: which order is on which machine, what material was issued, what was consumed, and what the job actually cost when the shift ended.
The registers that appear beside it
The usual pattern is quiet. Someone keeps a job card in a notebook. Stores writes an issue slip. The supervisor has a sheet for rework. At the end of the week those papers are typed into Tally as a summary, or they are not typed in at all.
- Material issued and material consumed are two different events. A summary voucher collapses them.
- A job that spans two shifts loses the operator and the machine unless someone writes them down at the time.
- Quality failures get a verbal note. The costing later has no place to put the scrap.
The point where the workaround is the system
Stop extending Tally when the same fact is written twice, and the second writing is what people trust. That is the job card, the bill of material that changes per order, and the cost that has to be known before the invoice, not after the month closes.
What to buy instead of building
A plant under about 15 to 20 people, with a standard process and a need to invoice this month, should buy a product and use Tally properly. A plant of 20 to 100 people with a mostly standard process should look at Odoo or ERPNext with a partner who has done that process before.
Custom software earns its place when the hand-offs are many, the spreadsheet is the real plan, or a product quote has already come back as a long customisation list. The accounts stay in Tally. The job does not.