How to import your restaurant's sales into Tally

Somewhere in most restaurants there is a person, often a part-time accountant, who takes a month of till printouts and types them into Tally. It is slow, it is where mistakes come from, and it is unnecessary. TallyPrime has imported data from files for years. The only work is deciding once how your sales should look in the books.

Three ways to get sales into Tally

1. Type a voucher a day by hand. Open the day's report from the till, enter one sales voucher with the total, the taxable value and the GST. Fine for a small counter, tedious past that.
2. Excel to Tally. Export the bills to a spreadsheet and use an Excel-to-Tally utility to convert them. Works, but the spreadsheet's columns have to match what the utility expects, and that breaks quietly when either changes.
3. Tally's own XML import. Your billing software writes a file in the format Tally reads natively. You import it from Gateway of Tally, Import, and the vouchers appear. Nothing in between to break. This is the one to aim for.

The ledgers, set up once

Before importing anything, the company in Tally needs the ledgers the vouchers will post to. For a restaurant charging 5% GST, four are enough:

• A sales ledger, such as "Sales @ 5% GST", under Sales Accounts.
• Output CGST @ 2.5%, under Duties & Taxes, with tax type GST and duty head CGST.
• Output SGST @ 2.5%, under Duties & Taxes, with duty head SGST/UTGST.
• A party ledger for the takings, such as "Counter Sales", under Sundry Debtors. The day's sales sit here until they are received into cash and bank.

A good import file creates these for you the first time: Import, Masters, and they appear under the right groups. You do this once per company.

One voucher a day, not one per bill

A café with 200 bills a day would put 6,000 vouchers a month into Tally if every bill became one. Nobody reads them and the company file grows heavy. For walk-in customers, GST asks for a summary of your sales to unregistered buyers, not each bill, so one sales voucher per day is the usual practice: the day's taxable value to the sales ledger, the CGST and SGST to their ledgers, and the total to the party ledger.

The exception is a bill to a business customer with a GSTIN. That one gets its own invoice in Tally, because it goes into your return as a B2B line with their GSTIN.

Make sure the daily vouchers come from the same numbers as your GST summary. If the till's GST report and the Tally vouchers are calculated separately, they will disagree by a few paise every day, and somebody will spend an evening finding out why.

Payment modes are receipts, not sales

A common mistake is to make three sales vouchers a day, one for cash, one for UPI and one for card. That splits the same sales three ways and makes the GST harder to follow. Instead:

1. One sales voucher for the day, to the party ledger.
2. Receipts against the party ledger as the money actually arrives: cash into the cash ledger, UPI and card into the bank as each settlement lands.

At the end of the month the party ledger should be close to zero. Whatever is left is money you billed and have not received, and that is worth knowing.

The import itself

1. Open the company in TallyPrime.
2. Gateway of Tally, Import, Masters. Choose the ledgers file. Only the first time.
3. Gateway of Tally, Import, Transactions. Choose the day's or the month's vouchers file.
4. Open the Day Book for the period and check the totals against the till's GST summary.

Importing the same day twice creates the vouchers twice. Keep a note of which days are in, or import whole months only after the month is closed.

Zomato and Swiggy payouts

Orders through the platforms need different treatment, because the platform pays the GST on the food and pays you a net amount after commission, fees, the GST on those fees, and TDS. A clean way to book a payout:

• A party ledger per platform, under Sundry Debtors, for what they owe you.
• "Platform commission and charges" under Indirect Expenses.
• "Input GST on platform fees" under Duties & Taxes, for the 18% GST charged on their fees.
• "TDS receivable" under Current Assets, for the income tax the platform deducted.

Then one journal per payout: commission, GST on fees and TDS moved off the platform's ledger, and the bank receipt for what actually arrived. Whether you can use that input GST depends on how you are registered, so that is a question for your CA. How the platforms arrive at the payout is in what Zomato and Swiggy really take.

What to hand your accountant

Every month: the ledgers file once, the month's sales vouchers file, the GST summary by day, the platform payout statements, and the bills as a spreadsheet for anything they want to check. With those, the month is an hour, not a week.

Retova's reports and Tally files come withCloud Billing at ₹299 a month and every plan above it: the four ledgers, one sales voucher a day from the same numbers as the GST summary, and a journal a day for Zomato and Swiggy fees and TDS from their uploaded statements. Every plan is on thepricing page.