Company Information

The first step to get started in Tally, is to Create a Company. The initial screen appears as shown:

The Gateway of Tally screen is separated into six sections, namely Title Area, Horizontal Button Bar, Main Area (Ctrl+M), Calculator Area (Ctrl+N), Button Bar and the Bottom Pane.

The elements of the Gateway of Tally screen are explained below:

Title Area

Title Area contains the Tally Copyright and Tally website link. You can access the Tally website directly from the Tally screen. You must have access to the Internet and Internet Explorer Web browser installed on your computer.

Click on the http://www.tallysolutions.com link on the top frame of the screen to enter our website. The link appears in all screens of Tally.

Tally logo is displayed at the centre of the Title Area.

The Product type (Tally Gold, Tally Silver, Tally Bronze or Educational) and Tally Serial Number appears on the upper-right corner. The software serial number is usually a unique number.

Horizontal Button Bar

The Buttons, Print (Alt+P), Export (Alt+E), E-mail (Alt+M), Upload (Alt+O), Language (Ctrl+L), Keyboard (Ctrl+K) and Help (Alt+H) can be seen in the Horizontal Button Bar.

Bottom Pane

The Bottom Pane contains the Version number, Release details (every time a new release of Tally is made, it is identified with a different release name like Release 3.14) and the Current Date (the date configured in the computer). The name of the day, date, month and year is displayed in DD, MM and YYYY format on the right-hand side.

System time (the time configured in the computer) appears on the lower-right corner in Hour: Seconds: Minutes (HH/MM/SS) format.

The Path appears in the lower left corner in the Bottom pane.

Close Button

The Close Button in the upper right corner functions similar to the use of ‘Esc’ in Tally. It brings you to back to the Gateway of Tally from any screen.

Minimise Button

The Minimise button performs the standard Windows Operating System’s function (Windows 95 onwards), allowing you to minimize Tally and work on other applications. To restore Tally, click on the Tally icon on the taskbar.

Main Area (Gateway of Tally)

The Main Area is separated into two:

The left-hand side provides information on Current Period, Current Date and List of Selected Companies (Name of the company and the date when last entry has been made).

The right-hand side displays the Company Information menu such as Select a Company, Create a Company, Backup a Company or Restore a Company and so on.

Hot Keys

Hot keys are capitalized and are red in colour on all the menu screens. Using the Hot Keys in the Company Info Screen will take you to that particular screen or display the sub - menus within that Option.

Calculator Area

Press [Ctrl + N] to activate the calculator. Calculator Area is used for calculator functions. Any type of independent calculation can also be done using the calculator.

Button Bar

The buttons are designed to make the work easier and faster and vary from one screen to another based on the screen functionality. They appear on the right hand side of the Tally screen and the inactive buttons are greyed out. You can either click these buttons or press the shortcut keys to access the relevant screen.

The following are some of the buttons and their functions:

Help (Alt+H) – To access Tally's online context-sensitive help

F1: Select Cmp – To select the company from the List of Companies and access data from other data directories on the local system or through the network. You can also access the Directory field by pressing [Backspace].

F12: Configure – To access the configuration settings to manage the information entered in Tally. For example, you can access the General Configuration to set country specific defaults, before creating a company.

Buttons where a character or function key is underlined indicates that you have to press underlined character or the function key along with [ALT] key.

Buttons where a character or function key is double underlined indicates, you have to press the character or the function key along with [CTRL] key.