Tally Launches Multilingual Accounting Software
By Sohini Bagchi
Bangalore, Feb 15, 2006

Indian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have a reason to smile now with financial accounting software major, Tally India, launching the country's first concurrent multilingual business accounting software targeted at SMEs.

In an exclusive with CXOtoday, Bharat Gopalakrishnan, CEO - South Asia Business, Tally, informed that with the launch of this new accounting and inventory management software, Version 8.1, SMEs can use a single software license to choose and use a language of their choice.

Speaking about the new launch, he said, The business accounting software which is launched in two editions, namely TallySilver 8.1 for a single user and TallyGold 8.1 for multiple users, is available in 10 Indian languages and also includes a dictionary containing 6,000 words in each

language with 95-98% accuracy in replacing a word with the appropriate word in a different language.

In addition to language capabilities, the new accounting package version provides support for fringe benefit tax computation, returns generation and payroll.

Gopalakrishnan explained with an example, "Users can interact with the software through all commonly performed functions by choosing from the built-in vernacular interfaces. For instance, a firm can now use a single software package that would allow them to issue a delivery sheet to a
Kolkata-based supplier in Bengali while preparing the balance sheet in Kannada, Marathi or any other Indian language."

"With the launch of this new product, we are addressing a fundamental challenge in the market that is to help SMEs speak to each other and their customers in their preferred language. The software can generate bills, invoices and other documentation in regional languages ensuring maximum readability among recipients," he added.

Gopalakrishnan further informed that the new version will now support entry of data in all unidirectional languages and scripts, concurrently, as the built-in interfaces in Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, have been integrated into the softwares latest release.

The software would soon include Urdu, Arabic and Chinese in the next few months and may be exported over the next few months to companies in West Asia and Asia Pacific regions, he added.

The new version is priced at Rs 9,000 for a single user edition and Rs 22,500 for a multi-user version. Existing customers of Tally can upgrade to the new version for Rs 2,000 and Rs 4,500 for single and multi-user editions respectively.

On the company's roadmap, Gopalakrishnan said, "With this new product, Tally expects to exceed 150,000-200,000 users of this software by the year-end and hopes to expand its existing base of 18 lakh users, from small and medium enterprises to large business houses."

The Rs 225-crore major is targeting three million SMEs in the country and targeting revenue of Rs 250 crore this year, he said.