How to speed up Tally.ERP9?

March 7, 2017

One of the common problems faced by Tally users is the speed issues where tally runs slow.

The issues being faced by users can be classified as follows:

1. Voucher saving time is increased and users face a lag while pressing enter for the voucher to be saved and the screen to be reloaded
2. While entering data certain lists such as items or cost centres take a long time to load
3. Reports take a long time to generate
4. While one user is generating report the other users face a lag

Reasons for slow speed

Tally uses a file based database architecture for storing of company data in a shared folder. As the data volume increases or the number of users increase the IO operations may become a bottleneck thus reducing the speed for all users.

General Steps

There are some common steps which are recommended to generally speed up Tally. The specific steps to be taken to address the issues identified above would be addressed later in the article.

Since Tally uses files as a database it is critical that we try and speed up IO operations on the Tally shared folder so as to ensure optimum performance.

Some of the basic steps are:

• Ensure that the Tally shared folder is put into the exceptions list for virus scanners

The tally data folder contains the tally data files. Some virus scanners may continue to scan the folder multiple times as and when they are accessed thus slowing the IO response. The exception settings should be done on the machine containing the tally data folder as well as all client machines where the folder is accessed

• Speed up network performance

Since the tally files are accessed over the network the performance of the network and the throughput would play a critical role in determining how fast reports and transactions run in Tally. Ask your hardware and networking vendor to take steps to increase the network performance.

• Use Remote Desktop Services

If you are running a Windows Server then you may consider using Remote Desktop Services to run Tally on the server. This eliminates the usage of the network to transfer large data files and generally increases performance. One should size the server according to the number of users and test printing from Tally before going for this step.

Masters

If opening master lists is slow in transactions, the problem will only be fixed partially by the general steps. The time taken to load masters cannot be reduced where the number of masters are in the range of tens of thousands. In such cases the company should explore splitting the data for multiple financial years and removing masters which are no longer in use. One may also customize tally using TDL for providing a partial list of masters or using search and display strategy for masters.

Transactions

Transaction saving time can be saved through the general steps identified above. In case you still face performance issues please contact us for a detailed check-up of your data and we will advise steps to be taken to improve performance. If transactions are running slow due to users running reports then the next section might interest you.

Reports

While running reports a lot of data may be accessed. This may lead to deterioration in performance for other users while the reporting thread is accessing the data. The solution for this problem is to use a third party reporting tool such as Orqubit Business Intelligence or EasyReports which extract data from Tally and store it in a database. Reports are run of the database which completely removes the reporting load from the Tally files. The other advantages of this is that the data becomes available in a standard database allowing complex reports to be developed easily and it would be possible for users would be also able to create their own reports.

If you still face problems in Tally.ERP9 please do contact us for a free evaluation and advisory session. We would be glad to help you.