| Setup and the first week | Install, create a company, and a trained accountant is productive on day one. The training cost is effectively zero because the industry paid it two decades ago. | A workspace exists in minutes, but somebody still has to define your services, plans, rates, roles and templates once. Budget a day or two of thinking, and do not skip it. |
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| Who uses it day to day | Usually one or two trained people at a desk. Security levels exist, and they exist to protect the books. | The whole team, in a browser, on whatever device is in their hand. Roles plus per-user permissions on every module, so the front desk can take a payment without seeing the P&L. |
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| GST invoicing | Yes, entered by whoever operates Tally, inside the same ledger the returns are produced from. | Yes, raised at the point of service by the person doing the work, with the tax split done for them rather than typed later from a slip. |
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| Statutory books and returns | Purpose-built and decades hardened — day book, ledgers, trial balance, P&L, balance sheet, with drill-down from a summary line to the voucher behind it. This is your auditor's home ground. | Not an accounting package, and we do not claim to be one. GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B CSVs exist where the workspace actually keeps the books — real estate and housing society today — plus TDS certificates. Everywhere else you get a register to hand over, not a return to file. |
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| Collections and payments | Receipts recorded against party ledgers once the money has arrived. | UPI pay-links on the document itself, reconciled server-side against a signed Razorpay webhook, with part-payments allocated to specific bills instead of one mysterious balance. |
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| Reminders and what is due next | No concept of a due date that has not yet become a voucher. A ledger learns about an event after it turns into money. | Dates live in the system — instalments, renewals, service visits, recalls — and the reminder goes out on its own, because the deadline is not in anybody's memory. |
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| Your customers | Not applicable. Your customers are ledger accounts. | Self-service portals — buyers, residents, patients, parents, students, members, agents — each showing their own statement, documents and payment history. The pay-link needs no login at all. |
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| Evidence and audit trail | Double-entry discipline you cannot casually break, and drill-down from any figure to the voucher that produced it — which is exactly what an auditor asks for. | An audit log on every change: who altered what, from what value to what value, and when. Read-only. It is what ends most month-end arguments. |
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| Depth in your trade | Universal by design. Every industry bends itself to the same ledger, which is precisely why it fits everywhere and why nobody has to explain it to a new hire. | Twenty separate workspaces modelled on the trade itself — job cards, tooth charts, batches and fee plans, allotments and construction-linked instalments, karigar job-work, maintenance cycles. |
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| Integrations | XML import and export, ODBC, and a partner ecosystem two decades deep. | A Tally connector built on purpose — a scheduled pull in real estate, on-demand voucher XML in jewellery and restaurant — plus Razorpay everywhere, scoped API keys everywhere, and WhatsApp Cloud API and Meta lead forms where they apply. The integrations page names the scope of each one. |
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| Where your data lives | Your company file, on your machine, fully offline. That means your backup discipline and your risk — and on the twentieth at eleven at night, offline is a genuine advantage. | A dedicated database per business, hosted in India, exportable whenever you want it. Browser-first, so the network matters; offline billing exists for the counter-heavy workspaces rather than everywhere. |
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| How it is bought | A licence through a partner network, with an annual services subscription behind updates. Installed, owned, and living with the accountant. | A monthly subscription per workspace, assembled from the modules you switch on, with a small rate for extra users. Longer commitments cost less. |
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