Branch Accounting Software

Been there and done that! This holds true for Tally, because this is its twelfth consecutive victory in Users' Choice. It's amazing to see such a high degree of brand loyalty that this brand enjoys. Since it's been there for so long, it's almost like a de facto standard in accounting. While last year, we still had two other brands in the club, this year we've only got two contenders. Even there, we don't have any specific brand making it to the club, but own/customized solutions. If we were to combine all the votes from the other contenders, even then they don't match up to Tally's votes. Just for information these consist of everything from Oracle Financials to ERP implementations, to even SQL based financial accounting. Last year, Ace and TCS-EX had made it to the Users' Choice club along with tally. The preference for accounting packages in this country shows distinct geographical preferences. Tally is perhaps the only brand with a consistent national presence. In fact , during the recent change over to VAT based accounting, Tally was the only brand, that was seen visible across the country, highlighting their VAT readiness. Another significant step has been to largely increase its channel presence, including even stationary and computer hardware shops in the list of Tally dealers. All this has obviously helped the brand immensely. Own/ customized accounting software is another continuing fancy of the Indian corporate IT and financial departments, which seems to have no end in sight. Organisations seem to be bent on re-inventing the wheel, partly because no of-the-shelf package fully meets their needs. What this must mean is that either customization options are too limited in existing packages or users are completely unaware of them. From a brand loyalty perspective, it doesn't look as if Tally has any threat. 92% of its customers chose to remain with Tally in the future also. While a few preferred to move to their own customized solutions or other options. Chances are that these companies' needs have gone beyond basic branch accounting, and therefore they need a more comprehensive solution such as ERP. In fact, upon closer examination, we found that most of these companies were from the BFSI segment. This further strengthens the fact that their needs have grown beyond basic accounting. Most banks are using larger core banking or highly specialized solutions, and therefore don't really need to use Tally. We also found a fairly large percentage of users from the manufacturing segment who said that they'd prefer their own/customized accounting solutions. Those who have their own or customized accounting solutions however have greater movement towards Tally. In fact, most of the respondents that are using their own/customized accounting solutions were from the north. Almost 19% of users who have their own accounting solutions said they'd like to move to Tally. Though Fact could not make it to the club, we did find some of the other accounting package owners wanting to shift to it. The way Tally's been winning, it doesn't look as if it can get dethroned that easily. One of the reasons that it still remains a favorite is its quick to react to market conditions. The moment the Govt. introduced VAT in this budget, Tally immediately sprung into action and introduced its VAT ready accounting package and even offered attractive upgrade schemes.