Improving your business efficiency is maximizing your output from your existing resources – or making the most of what you have. If you have not thought about how to improve business efficiency, you may well be overlooking places where you can cut down on the time you’re spending on particular tasks. Improved efficiency will surely save you money and manpower in both the short term as well as in the long run. You have already taken the first step by buying and using Tally Prime. Now to the next step; use some of these simple tips that will save long hours doing manual work. In the first article in this series on improving efficiency with Tally, we will be looking at efficiently using the banking features of Tally Prime
There can be economy only where there is efficiency.
Benjamin Disraeli
1) E-payments with Tally Prime
A lesser-known amazing option is the e-Payments feature of Tally Prime. Using this, you can send directly send payment instructions to your bank effortlessly from within Tally. Tally Prime has an inbuilt e-payments module integrated with 10 banks as of now with more coming soon. With this module, you can make all payments including vendor payments, employee salaries etc directly from within Tally Prime. The accountant can pass the relevant payment entries in Tally and upload them to the bank at the click of a button. The authorised person can then simply approve, keep on hold or reject the transactions via the bank’s mobile app or net banking. The entire process is completely safe and secure without scope for misuse. The accountant or any unauthorized person will never be able to access the bank account directly.
Tally Prime supports the following Indian banks as of date; DBS Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, YES Bank, ICICI Bank, Tokyo & Mitsubishi, HDFC Bank, Bank of Baroda, Citibank and one bank in UAE viz, Standard Chartered Bank. To use e-payments in Tally Prime, you simply need to contact your bank or relationship manager and ask them to enable the bulk upload/payment facility for your particular account. This single banking features of Tally will save you hours of manual work over a period of time in adding payees via net banking or filling out NEFT request forms or writing cheques.
How to use e-Payments with Tally Prime
You need to contact your bank to enable the bulk upload facility and then enable e-payments feature in Tally Prime. Once the bulk upload/payment is authorised by your bank for your account, the next step is to enable it for your bank ledger in Tally Prime. The process to record an e-payment transaction in Tally Prime is very simple and is the same as recording any normal payment transaction. Simply select the bank for which e-payments has already been configured and then select the party to whom the payment is to be made and enter the amount. You only need to ensure that you have entered correct bank details in your party master. Tally Prime has the facility to save multiple beneficiaries for a particular party. Thus, you can choose which bank to transfer payment to for the particular ledger during payment voucher entry.
A detailed guide to configuring e-payments in Tally Prime is available here.
2) Auto Bank Reconciliation with bank statement
If you are looking to improve business efficiency with Tally, then you cannot skip Tally auto bank reconciliation. This is one of the best banking features of Tally to implement and requires almost no efforts. You can save at least a couple of hours every month with auto bank reconciliation. Tally has an inbuilt feature that directly recognizes the bank statement formats of almost all banks providing excel download facility of the bank account statement. You can reconcile the bank transaction dates with Tally voucher dates in minutes for the entire month. Tally also provides its users with an option to create a new voucher from the reconciliation screen itself for a transaction not reflecting in the books of accounts such as bank charges.
3) Cheque Book Management.
Tally has an excellent cheque book management feature with which you can maintain multiple cheque book series in Tally and also, accurately track the status of every cheque. You can find out Issued, Cancelled and Unreconciled cheques. No need to hunt for the cheque book to find out the last cheque issued or to find out the status of a particular cheque leaf. Find all details at the click of a few buttons from within Tally.
4) Printing of Deposit Slips and Payment Advice.
Now there is no need to spend precious time manually writing out bank deposit slips. You can simply pass the receipt entries and take a printout of the deposit slip and submit it to your bank. Tally has the option to print single as well as multiple deposit slips. Users can also take prints of payment vouchers to save the time taken in writing physical vouchers. Tally has the option to directly generate a payment-advice and print or directly email it to the concerned party from within the software as required. This is among the easiest to implement of all banking features of Tally to improve business efficiency.
A detailed step-by-step guide to auto bank reconciliation, cheque book management, printing of deposit slips and payment advice is available here.
5) Cheque Printing
Tally provides for an easy to use cheque printing facility inherently supporting almost all formats of most Indian and International banks. Many banks have multiple cheque formats and Tally supports almost all of them. Cheque printing is very simple and easy to configure in Tally Prime. Just select the bank and then select the required format from the different cheque images of that particular bank. Tally will automatically configure the settings for you. You only have to do the finer adjustments manually. Most importantly, with Tally, you can directly print on regular cheques issued by banks.
You can configure cheque printing using this help topic.
6) Management of Post Dated Transactions
Another useful banking feature of tally helpful to improve business efficiency is PDC management. Any cheque with a future issue date is called a post-dated cheque or PDC. Post-dated cheques are a very essential part of any business and are a must for proper fund management. It becomes difficult at times to keep track of PDCs. Tally Prime helps you with comprehensive PDC Management for receipt, payment and contra vouchers. You can enter the cheque into Tally immediately after receiving or issuing it and mark it as post-dated. A cheque marked as post-dated will not be posted into accounts of issuer/receiver on voucher entry. The transaction will automatically affect the accounting books on the date of the post-dated cheque.
The user has the option to check the party balance with or without considering the PDCs entered as per requirements. Tally provides a comprehensive summary of all transactions involving post-dated cheques is available in the Post-dated Summary report. You can consider post-dated transactions in major accounting reports such as Ledger Vouchers, Group Summary, Outstanding reports etc.
You can read about post dated cheques management along the various related reports here.
Conclusion
Reducing costs and maximizing output are tried-and-true ways to beat your competition and increase profit margins. There are many more simple tricks you can follow to significantly improve business efficiency with Tally Prime. We will be covering more in subsequent articles. Do comment on what you think of this article and also suggest topics on which you would like us to write on. Feel free to suggest more such tips related to banking that we may have missed out in the comments below. You could contact us for any assistance or to upgrade to Tally Prime and we would be delighted as always to assist you.
