A Guide on How to Maintain Accounts With or Without Inventory in Tally ERP 9

All business firms must learn how to maintain inventory in Tally or use a method to maintain accounts in ledgers and journals. However, when one speaks of accounts, you refer to a separate ledger and what it shows. In Tally, we can maintain accounts and deal with the inventory and stock. Thus we can also deal with the trading and manufacturing accounts by creating an account statement with the inventory. Besides the firm's accounts, you can make the inventory to display the inventory master account concurrently with the items/group of items dealt with, stock entries, and more. Let us see how we can do this.

Did you know? Tally is excellent for small businesses. Besides being trusted software, you can also scale it for medium industries, especially since the Tally ERP 9 solution is compliant with the GST Act requirements of maintaining stock.

Features of Tally:

Tally is very widely used and popular. Some of its amazing features are

1. General Accounting: Under this head, you have three options - to maintain accounts only, maintain accounts with inventory integrated and separate maintaining of accounts and inventory.
2. Profit or Cost Center Management: This head includes features like maintaining a cost centre, maintaining payrolls, job costing using the cost centre details, using the cost centre's pre-defined values for transactions, maintaining multiple cost centres and payrolls, and showing opening balances of all revenue items.
3. Bill Management: The features of interest here are maintaining details bill wise and the ability to calculate the interest components of the bills. 
4. Invoicing: The features included are invoice, use and record credit & debit notes and record transactions involving purchases. 
5. Scenario and Budget Management: A useful feature is reversing optional vouchers and journals and maintaining controls/ budgets.
6. Banking: The features included here enable banking features, cheque printing, and managing the forward-dated transactions.
7. Other interesting features: Tally's can maintain or alter the ledger and company multiple mailing details and enable zero-value transactions and the company logo printing.

Also read: All About Banking Entry In Tally ERP 9

Choosing the mode of accounting operations:

Here's how you configure the options available in the three modes.

• Maintain accounts only
• Accounts integrated with inventory option
• Accounts and Inventory maintained separately option 

When you select 'Accounts only', no inventory details are added. If you do not have any purchase entry in Tally without inventory or inventory transactions, you can use the maintain accounts option by setting the option to 'Yes'. 

To enable the options in maintaining stock in Tally ERP 9, you must change the settings to 'Yes' and press Ctrl+A to accept the changes made. For example, set the Maintain Accounts only tab to 'No' and click Ctrl+A to use inventory features.  

If you select the accounts with the integrated inventory option, your next step should be to set the menu for the inventory information and its details. 

After you go to the gateway of Tally, the company operations screen is as below. 

Setting the inventory information menu:

The 'Inventory Info' menu is a 'master inventory list with details like Stock Items, Groups, Measurement units, etc., which can be displayed, altered, or created to display the master inventory details. 

To see the display of the inventory info, you use the Tally gateway and set the F11 tab query 'Maintain Accounts only' to 'No'. Under the F11 tab, select the accounting features listed under the F1 tab to see the display of inventory info. 

• The F11 tab sets the features and the settings for the transaction entries.
• The F12 tab helps you configure your master inventory information. Remember, the default settings here are set to 'No' and need to change it to 'Yes' to enable features configuration of the inventory info creation and details displayed. Clicking on the F12 tab anywhere in the Tally menu heads straight to the configure tab.

​​​​​​​Also read: How to do Payroll Management in Tally ERP 9

What are Inventory Stock Groups?

The 'stock groups' help classify the various Stock Items based on product type, brand, quality, and more in an inventory. Putting all items under such stock groups enables you to easily undertake tasks like entering closing stock in Tally ERP 9 and reporting and locating the stock items when drawing up an accounting statement.

How to create a ‘Stock Group”?

Since the Stock Items are grouped based on common features like product type, brand, etc., in the closing stock in Tally, you will need to create your stock group list under the master inventory. First, head to the Tally Gateway, choose the Inventory Info tab using F11, select enable or 'Yes' to get the accounts with inventory option, and then choose the Stock Group tab under F1.

Here, you need to choose the 'Create' tab under the single stock group option and enter your stock group's name (Ex: Grade One/Two/Three). You can also create additional names 'under' this group using the 'Alias' option (Ex: Under '1/11/111 Primary group).

Ensure you choose a sub-group, parent group, primary group, etc., from the dropdown options. If it is not mentioned in your stock group, create the stock group using the Alt+C command.

The next field to specify is the 'Should item quantities be added'? Note that items should have the same measurement unit to be grouped. You cannot club items with 'pcs' as the measure with items having 'kgs' as the measure. Entering your stock items under this single group ensures that all these items clubbed together under this group will be added together in the inventory.

The next query here is whether to Alter/Set the GST details. Click 'Yes' if you wish to enable the option and define the GST rate applicable.

Click enter tab to save the information. If you find some items do not belong to this group, you can go back and reconfigure your options for these items under a different group.

Creation Button Commands:

In the creation screen of the stock group, you can use the button commands as follows.

How to create multiple groups?

Tally's ERP 9 is most popularly used and has a create option wherein you can create a single group or multiple groups under the Create Stock Groups option tab. It is used to change the closing stock value, which automatically reflects in the P&L statement when integrated with the accounts.

If you follow the same procedure to create a multiple stock groups option, you have to create 'under' multiple groups as your option instead of creating a single group.

From the Groups Listing shown below, you have to select the parent or primary group and then enter the name of your stock group. (Ex: Brand A, B, C).

Selecting a specific group and not the 'All Items' in the 'Under' tab helps enter data speedily. The column's 'Group Name' selected is auto-filled with the cursor skipping the chosen column. Thus brand names allocated can be grouped under Group 1, 11,111 etc.

Selecting 'All Items' ensures that the cursor permits you to manually enter the parent group for each selected brand or group.

Note that the 'Should Item Quantities be added?' option permits you to enter or not enter the units and whether to add this feature in the how to add closing stock in the Tally section.

Creation of Multiple Stock Groups Button Options:

Here's a quick table for the button options in the how to enter closing stock in Tally, the shortcut keys, and its details under the multiple Stock Group creation procedure.

Note that in the accounts-only mode, you cannot use the inventory. However, you can use TDS, GST, Payroll, VAT etc., in all the three accounting modes, namely 'Accounts only', 'Accounts integrated with inventory' and 'Accounts and Inventory separately maintained'.

Also read: Shortcut Keys in Tally Prime

Display or Alter Stock category:

The process is simple, and once you are in the Master Stock screen, you can use the button options and display them to your CD writer, CRT or Monitor. Using the 'All Items' and 'List of Groups' options, you can work in any group, subgroup, category, or subcategory, etc., provided these features have been enabled on the initial F11 settings screen. Remember, F12 can be used to configure settings.

Button options table for single or multiple alter or display:

Note that deleting any stock category in the 'Alter' option means that you must first delete all items and subgroups under it.

Also read: All About Tally.ERP 9's Cost Centre

Conclusion

The above discussion on the Tally ERP software solution is relevant to how to maintain company accounts in Tally without or with the inventory options. Thus using Tally for inventory resolves all issues of maintaining the inventory. Stock Items addition, display, altering, etc., all follow the same procedures and basic button options laid out above. The benefits of Tally are many, especially in accounting and GST compliance.

Tally users can also use the Biz Analyst application to manage the business more effectively. You can manage the accounts, make ledgers, and even do data entry to keep the business on the right track.