A clean company setup prevents months of problems later: wrong financial year, GST not enabled, no bill-wise tracking. Get these right first.
Create the company
Company › Create (Alt+K): name, mailing name, address, state (decides intra/inter-state GST), financial year from 1 April, books beginning date, base currency INR.
F11 features to switch on
Feature
Why
Maintain inventory
Stock items, quantities, stock valuation
Enable GST
GST ledgers, invoices, returns data
Maintain bill-wise details
Outstanding by invoice, ageing
Cost centres
Expenses by branch/department
Multiple price levels
Wholesale vs retail prices
Security and backups
Enable user security so staff have their own logins and rights. Back up daily (Data › Backup) to another drive or cloud folder; Tally data on one PC is a single point of failure.
⚠️ If you set a TallyVault password and lose it, the data cannot be recovered by anyone. Store it in a password manager.
💡 Always practise new things in a separate practice company, never in the live books.
Menus follow TallyPrime (current versions); older Tally ERP 9 menus differ. GST rates and rules shown are examples; confirm current rules before filing.
Practice
Create the practice company and switch on the features in the checklist.
📎 Practice files for this article
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Lesson 1 checklistStep-by-step exercises for this lesson.
