Keep the books. Add the shop floor.

Tally does what it does extremely well, and if your business is trading or services, it may be all you ever need. The problem it does not solve is the one a factory has: the twenty steps that happen before an accounting entry exists. Who asked for the material, which three vendors quoted, what the order said, what actually arrived, what failed inspection, what was issued to the job, and what it truly cost to make. Those are the questions a plant argues about at month-end, and they live outside the ledger.

A purchase indent that a department raises and a manager approves. An RFQ you float to several vendors, with their quotes side by side. A purchase order that knows what it was quoted. A goods receipt that records short supply and damage, holds material for inspection, and only then lets it into stock. A bill of materials, a production order that issues those materials and costs the output at what the materials genuinely cost. And a dispatch that turns into a challan and an invoice.

Every one of those steps writes its own double-entry as part of the same database transaction. Accept a goods receipt: stock rises, the value is costed at moving average, and the journal is posted. Verify a supplier invoice: the liability is raised with input GST split into CGST and SGST, or IGST if the vendor is out of state. Nothing is queued for someone to enter later, so there is no month-end pile and no reconciliation between two systems that disagree.

Comparison written against TallyPrime's standard capabilities for a manufacturing user. Tally is a registered trademark of Tally Solutions Pvt. Ltd.; we are not affiliated with them.