In the final 'Tally', it was grandad's rebuke that inspired a successful 'Made in India' story

To create an entity of lasting value, there should be the joy of creation and a stubbornness to build something that would touch people in valuable ways. Even technology would not stand in the way. This, in a nutshell, is the story of Tally Solutions, the country's leading business software for small and medium businesses.

"The best products are built by stubborn teams. A little bit of stubbornness and a little bit of courage to believe that you can build something of value," said Tejas Goenka, the Managing Director of Tally Solutions Private Limited, while delivering the 'Lead Talk' on the topic 'The Swadeshi Effect: Building from India, for the World' at the sixth edition of Techspectations held in Kochi on Friday.

"Build me something I can use for myself", was the repeated remark made by Tejas's grandfather as he kept brushing aside the business proposal demos Tejas's father went to him with. These presentations of his father had figures and ideas that seemed obscure for the common man, and his grandfather did not have the patience for such complexities.

"Each time my father was abruptly rejected by my granddad with the same remark, 'Why can't you build me something that I can use for myself'," Tejas said.  

His grandfather's reprimand - 'build me something that I can use for myself' - is the foundation for a lot of the principles used at Tally. "The rejected demos brought out the first codeless accounting project. We built our own database, memory manager and maths routines," Tejas said.

Tejas's father tinkered with Excel, Microsoft's spreadsheet application, and indigenised it with versions of Lotus. Tally developed its own accounting software, database and communication protocol. It even created its own language called TDL (Tally Definition Language). Tally did not even use Microsoft or Mac products. 

"The stubbornness had forced dad to look at exploring the possibility of building technologies that actually matter," Tejas said.

Now, Tally simplifies business management for five to six million businesses. The company has cornered 60 per cent of the Middle East market. "There are tens of millions of professionals with resumes with Tally's imprint," Tejus said.

This is the reward that stubbornness can eventually bestow. "The ability for millions of lives to be impacted is real," Tejas said. Millions of customers now use Tally's inventory module, by far the largest in the world. 

Though the most popular, Tally was not the first to create an inventory module. "The best need not be the first," Tejas said. Google was not the first search engine, though it has remained the most popular. Microsoft, too, was not the first.