Mifos and Tally Accounting Integration Overview

Owned by Ed Cable
Last updated: Sept 12, 2011 by Lindsey Livingston (Unlicensed)Version comment
3 min read

The purpose of the integration with Tally is to avoid duplication of accounting entries in both Mifos and Tally. There is a lot of effort duplication when making the same entries or similar entries in both Mifos and Tally.

All transactions related to customers/members like loan disbursement, repayments (both principal and interest), fee collection etc. are already being recorded in Mifos. The interface will help in automatically making accounting entries in Tally for these transactions with minimal effort.

Mifos typically maintains the list of branches, centers, groups and members and all transactions associated to members of groups and SHG's and their loans and savings accounts. These transactions would include loan disbursements, collections, fees, charges, penalties, interest payments, interest received, membership fees, etc.

Tally typically maintains all financial transactions. These transactions would include all (or summary) of the above transactions done in Mifos and also other financial transactions like inter-bank fund transfers, petty cash transactions, cash deposited from branches to head-office or banks, cash disbursed to branches, cash withdrawn from bank etc.

Why Tally?

  • Tally is widely accepted as the Accounting application for small and medium size enterprises in India
  • Wide acceptance from auditors and accountants – this makes all year end processing and regulatory closing of books and filing of returns much easier
  • Indian regulatory requirements for Accounting practices is met by Tally to a very large extend
  • Tally offers discounts to NGO's and non-profit organizations

Required Software

  • Mifos 2.x+
  • Mifos Business Intelligence Suite
  • Tally.ERP 9

Mifos-Tally Interface Process Flow

Steps

  1. Do loan related transactions (disbursements, repayments, applying fees etc.) on Mifos
  2. Login to Pentaho Reporting Server and run the Tally Integration Report for a date range
  3. Export the data (the same data that is displayed in the Tally Integration Report) to local XML files
  4. Import these XML files to Tally. Review the logs and the transactions in Tally to confirm that the import was successful.

Set-up required in Tally for the Integration:

  1. Set up branches as cost centers in Tally: Branch name in Tally should be the same in MIFOS
  2. Synchronize ledger/GL accounts of MIFOS and Tally: Alias of ledger account in Tally should be the same as GL account code in MIFOS
  3. Set up automatic numbering of vouchers in Tally

Notes/Implementation Steps for the Tally Interface:

  1. Have a Tally Test environment setup in your office where the integration can be tested without disturbing your production Tally instance.
  2. Test Reporting server will be setup for you by us (Mifos Support) which will internally extract data from your Mifos Test environment
  3. Test the integration:
    1. Do transactions on the Mifos Test environment
    2. Connect to the Test Reporting Server
    3. Run the Interface Report
    4. Export the report data as XML files.
    5. Import the data into your Tally Test setup
    6. Review data/reports in Tally and review import logs for accuracy
  4. Once this testing is complete the same environment can be setup for your production environment from which the accounting data can be exported and imported into Tally.
  5. We will need to jointly work towards planning for these activities and the dates associated to each of them