Tally Solutions' journey began much before the SaaS, UPI, GST, and startup boom. Founded in 1986, the accounting software company has outlasted several technology cycles and built a customer network of close to three million.
In a fireside chat with Shradha Sharma, Founder & CEO, YourStory and The Bharat Project, Tally's Managing Director Tejas Goenka and Executive Director Nupur Goenka explained how Tally, a homegrown product company, stayed relevant for four decades.
Nupur Goenka attributed Tally's success to its focus on ownership. Tally handcrafted its stack from the start, she said, with its own database, its own memory manager, and a programming language invented in-house. The company has rewritten its entire stack five times without carrying over a single line of code.
“The willingness to do that, because you remain uncompromising about your objectives, has been the culture of the company since day one,” she said.
Tejas Goenka stressed on the company' founding principle. "The cost post-purchase should be near zero,” he said, recalling the days when releases were shipped with a support team of one.
Drawing a distinction between being boring and being comfortable, Nupur spoke about the culture of change in the company.
“There’s a tendency sometimes to confuse the boring and successful with the comfortable,” she said. “When you find yourself in any form of comfort zone, it signals unwillingness to change and inertia.” She shared her father’s suggestion to usher in a change every few months to keep the company alive.
On the advent of AI, the Goenkas concurred that the fundamentals will not change: cost, reliability in a business of trust, and privacy. The company uses AI to make Tally useful for founders without compromising customer data.
Tejas talked about a textile manufacturer with revenues of around Rs 1,500 crore where only four people know the customer names. “Imagine giving that data to AI,” he said.
Nupur recalled being told on her first day at Tally that a customer’s data is only the customer’s data. Nobody inside the company has access to it, she said. The challenge is to deliver insights and access to credit without breaking that promise.
The Goenkas also acknowledged the criticism that Tally serves accountants rather than owners. An attempt in 2020 to make changes in its software did not go well. “People threw shoes at me almost,” said Tejas. “We are now not shackled by what was, and we can now make what should be,” he said.
Tejas was candid about the missed opportunities: payroll, which Tally ventured into in Dubai around 2004-05 without finding users, and a retail product it later retired. He still sees payroll as a white space.
Looking ahead, Tejas struck an optimistic note. Tally has made about seven releases in the last three to four years that many customers are yet to discover, and UI changes are due in the coming weeks and months, he said.
Tally is also betting on new geographies, notably the Middle East and Africa.
“We have an incredible two, three decades in front of us... It would be a shame if we let that opportunity slip to create an impactful technology company out of this country.”
Edited by Swetha Kannan