Shoaib Ahmed Vice-President – Sales, Tally Solutions

Shoaib Ahmed  Vice-President – Sales, Tally Solutions

An Indian product company in the software space, which has grabbed maximum of attention, is Tally Solutions. Not only has it been successful in creating its exclusivity in the Indian SMB market for business accounting software, but it is trying to prove its mantle in the overseas market as well. Recently, VARIndia had an interaction with Shoib Ahmed, Vice-President – Sales, Tally Solutions, about the company’s strategy. Excerpts…

How do you project Tally as a business accounting tool provider or an ERP provider? 
Traditionally, since its inception, Tally has aimed to fulfil the needs of the discerning small business. As businesses have evolved, we have been nimble enough to respond to their needs by providing them with solutions ranging from Accounting to Finance management to inventory control and compliance management. With the growing SMB industry’s needs, Tally has recently introduced Tally 9, which is positioned as the complete business solution for the small business, usable in any major Indian language.

How do you differentiate the present version of Tally from the predecessors? 
Tally 9 includes features and modules like Payroll, Job Costing and Point-of-Sale for retail billing among a notable few. The core technology engine which has made Tally successful in the past has now been enhanced with ‘C:mulate’ technology  to continue to play a vital role in translating the Power of Simplicity into the design and usability. The current version comes with increased speed, power and performance – benefits that are clearly visible for users. 
This version enables the user to operate and transact his business, using language of his choice. This has seen tremendous buy in from the segments. For example, with Tamil Nadu going live on VAT, there is a need felt by the sales tax departments to file VAT returns in the Tamil language. This is being accomplished by the user by doing his transactions in English and yet being able to file returns in Tamil. 

How do you address compliances? 
In the current scenario, Tally encourages and assists in the compliance of statutory norms – be it in the implementation of VAT, Fringe Benefit Tax or service tax. 
As regards implementation of VAT, Tally offers features like state-specific VAT classification, pre-defined rate of taxes, VAT annexure report generation based on commodity HSN code, VAT computation reports, printing of state-specific VAT returns along with annexures, VAT entries in support of reversal of input tax credit before filing of VAT returns and regular VAT statutory file update on any change in tax rate without modification to the existing data.
To address service tax compliance, Tally facilitates automatic calculation of service tax, service tax liability computation and input service tax eligible on a receipt and payment basis, service tax payable report based on receipts, generation of TR-6 challan from Tally, regular service tax statutory file update on any change or addition to taxable service and rates, configuration facility to track partial or whole claim of input service tax towards taxable and exempted services and generation of half yearly ST-3 return with month-wise and category-wise breakup of service tax details. Tally provides a statutory file on all taxable services along with abatement applicability. TDS is also facilitated by Tally through the incorporation of features like maintenance of pre- defined rate of TDS on the respective nature of payment along with exemption limit, pre-defined rate of TDS based on the deductee type, facility to generate TDS payment challan – ITNS - 281, TDS payable reports, TDS challan reconciliation with payment details, generation of Form - 16A, facility to generate e-TDS compliant file format, printing of Form - 27A and accounting of interest, penalty and other charges. 
Tally supports compliance of Fringe Benefit Tax as well by providing the pre-defined rate of FBT applicable based on the type of business, facility to record FBT and FBT entries in a single voucher (Document), auto filing of FBT liability, FBT computation with drill down of classification, generation of FBT Challan – ITNS 283, FBT liability computation and identification of Advance Tax and Self-Assessment tax. Tally provides a statutory file on all types of FBT categories. 

How the existing customers of Tally update their versions for compliances? We currently offer two paths (upgrade vouchers, redeemable currency) for our customers to upgrade their existing licence to the latest version. 

Can a large enterprise use Tally for large accounts or it has limitations? Large companies have been some of the early adopters of Tally. To give you a quick example of the landscape, of all the Fortune 500 companies, 250 of them are using Tally. 40 per cent of the TATA Group companies, 40 per cent of the Birla Group companies and almost all the companies of the Singhania Group use Tally.

How many distributors and channel partners do you have? 
We currently operate under a model, which necessitates a framework of five distributors with a national reach and supported by approximately 100 Direct Channel Partners. Besides this, the channel ecosystem is supported by 3,000 resellers. 

What is the present channel strategy of Tally in India? 
We have always believed that for a growing economy like India, any channel strategy has to always bank on the value into volume business model. Our current strategy is geared towards ensuring that we capitalize on this growing wave of potential users of Tally by structuring a channel framework that has the ability and competence to market, sell and service the entire cycle of customers and prospects. Provide some perspective on the overseas operations. 
On our road map, we are conscious of repeating the successes of Tally in the South Asian region to similar, emerging and high-growth economies worldwide and have made a good effort towards establishing our credentials in the Middle East and North African markets.

What is your strategy for ERP products? 
In a few months, we are going to launch our ERP suite TallyAscent, typically targeting the medium and large enterprises. It is expected that in three years there will be a demand for 200,000 ERP installations in India. TallyAscent is affordable, easy to deploy, very cost-effective and does not require experts to maintain it. We have spent the bulk of our time on its development to cross all these engineering hurdles. Also currently, 1,000 employees are working at Tally and we will increase that number to 2,500 over the next three years. Most of the hiring will be for system integrators, to help our partners in deploying ERP solutions.