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A practical guide: moving your books from Tally

· 3 min read
The Thoshika team
The Thoshika team
ZPOA

Many companies we speak to keep their accounts in Tally. This guide walks through moving them to Thoshika Books with the data migration tool, and the checks to make before you switch over.

1. Choose your cut-over date​

Pick a clean date to start in Books, usually the first day of a month or of the financial year. You will bring masters and opening balances as at that date, and optionally the vouchers of the current year.

2. Export from Tally​

From Tally Prime or ERP 9, export as XML:

  • Masters: groups, ledgers (including customers and vendors with their GSTINs), stock items and godowns.
  • Vouchers: sales, purchase, receipt, payment, journal and contra vouchers, and credit and debit notes, for the period you want to bring across.

3. Prepare Books​

Before importing, set up the basics in Books:

  1. Add each GST registration with its state and branch.
  2. Review the chart of accounts. Tally's primary groups are mapped to Books account groups during the import.
  3. Set the opening balance date.

4. Upload, map and dry run​

Open Admin, Data migration, choose Tally as the source and upload the XML. Thoshika recognises the Tally format and maps it.

Then run a dry run. The whole import runs with all of Books' rules, including GST recalculated per line, and is then rolled back. You get a report of any rows that would be rejected and why, for example a ledger with an invalid GSTIN or a voucher that refers to a missing ledger. Fix them in Tally or in the file, and run the dry run again until it is clean.

5. Import and check​

Run the import. The report shows what was created, updated, skipped and rejected, the trial balance totals, and the amount left in opening balance equity. When ledger, party and stock openings agree, that amount is zero.

Then compare with Tally:

  • the trial balance as at the cut-over date;
  • outstanding receivables and payables, bill by bill;
  • stock quantities and values by godown;
  • GST payable and input credit for the last period.

If something went wrong, you can roll back the whole import: invoices and payments are voided and journals reversed. Re-running the same file later updates masters and skips documents already posted, so nothing is duplicated.

6. Running both for a while​

Some companies keep Tally in use during a transition, for example for a branch that moves later. The Integration Hub has a beta Tally connector that can send vouchers from Thoshika to Tally through the Thoshika Bridge, a small agent that runs on your office network next to Tally. It is built on Tally's published XML format and has not yet been tested against live Tally installations, so check the first vouchers carefully. Thoshika is not affiliated with Tally Solutions.

For the full list of what the migration tool handles, see the data migration guide and the Books guide.