It was a hot Monday afternoon when we met Bharath Goenka to talk about India's first packaged software developed to handle the finances of any organization. A cool and composed Goenka welcomed us with a smile to answer CIOL readers' questions to him.

Bharath Goenka, the only son of SS Goenka, was forced to develop a new accounting software when a host of accounting packages, which were available in the market, didn't help him.

“Our father had a business which was related to textile industry. We needed a good accounting package for the business. During that time, there were a lot of accounting packages available in the market. But all of them did require certain tech knowledge to operate. I wanted to develop a new accounting software that supported the conventional method of writing accounts.”

“So I started my work and one day I called my father for a demo. I told him to type T001 on the computer. My Father asked what is this 'T001' all about. I told him that the computers do not understand our language, but work only on Binary, which we had to key in commands in its language. At this my father asked me to develop a software which can understand the human language instead of forcing him to learn the computer language. It took almost 18 months since that day to develop the first version of the accounting software,” recalls Goenka.

Today, Tally has a global reputation and acceptance for its simplicity. CIOL would bring the story of India's first IT product company which enjoys the trust of over 6 lakh customers and the largest partner network with over than 20,000 partners and which has won 12 consecutive PCQuest users' choice awards.

In this episode of 'Journey to the Top', we are selecting a few questions from the readers, who have asked Bharat Goenka about his company and the product.

What made you to start Tally? Why did you choose product business?

Shika Kempola

Bharat Goenka: The first part, what made us to start Tally, was to try and find a solution to our own business. We used to run our own SSI. During the first six months of its development, we were not really trying to start a business but find a solution for our own business. But, in the meanwhile we realized what we were trying to do has the potential of touching the lives of a million! That is when we took the conscious decision to develop a full-fledged product.

For the second part of the question, on why a product business. There was hundred per cent clarity that we want to touch the lives of a million, and we could do it only through a product framework. We first went to the market after 18-20 months since we started working on the product.

What was your thought process when you decided to bring out a financial accounting software firm? Was it actually needed then?

DS

BG: Absolutely needed then, now and will be needed in future too! If you are doing a successful business, but do have your finances in the grip, you cannot predict the future. And, even if your business is not doing well, but if you have control of the finances, you will have the potential to turn it around.

From that perspective it is a durable need, and effectively from that thought we were always looking at solving the business problem. But what is central to the business problem is that if you cannot solve your finance-related problem, then any other business problem is irrelevant to solve.

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There was not even a single large player of today, which did not have a software in that time. TCS had its Master Key series, Softeck had Sins, Wipro had its product called BSS, Vishesh Technologies had SunPack... enough of them. We tried all of them and my father could not understand them. He said something that we follow even today and you will find the reflections of this in our product – “When I buy a car, I want to be the driver and not a mechanic.” Similarly, we buy computers to run business, but not to be computer engineers.