About the App

A couple of years ago, a close friend and I founded an online rentals startup. As anyone who has run their own business knows, it's a daily fight for survival and as first time entrepreneurs with no outside funding, we struggled just like everyone else. There are only 24 hours in a day and it always felt like we had a 100 things to complete but time for only 20 of them.

Over time we started to get a bit smarter and learnt how to prioritise the more important stuff (like sales and business development) and use technology to automate what we could (like accounting). One of the things we built (but in a very rudimentary form) was a process to record our sales entries in an Excel file and pass them in a single import process into our accounting software Tally.

This saved us a lot of time because Tally is quite restrictive in how it works. You can only pass 1 entry at a time and there is no way to copy / paste / create templates for recurring entries. We had thousands of sales entries which were mostly of the format Cash / Bank Dr. To Sales Cr. and each entry would take time to pass. In excel, we could create a template and copy the ledger names and dates that were used again and again across many rows and use other functionality like vlookup to make our lives easier. With our method, we were able to pass over 3000 entries pertaining to sales transactions and their subsequent payment with a couple of hours of prep work and 10 seconds to upload. If we had tried to do it manually, we would have taken several days - which would have meant more time lost in focusing on running our business.

When I looked out for solutions to the problem we faced, I found a few companies who were providing software for this. But they were all quite expensive + the required software to be download locally and run. This comes with its own problems like being forced to update regularly, worrying about viruses and security and system compatibility issues. Plus their systems were old fashioned, difficult to use and didn't have a good user experience. Some of them didn't even have basic error checking which meant that after using the tool, if you tried an upload, it would fail and you would need to start from scratch again.

Even though we have since shut down our startup, the seed of an idea was planted in my mind. I thought that if there was an easy to use tool which could help people pass their accounting entries in Tally quicker, it would be useful to anyone running their own business or even managing accounts for someone else's business.

I've always wanted to learn how to code so after shutting down our startup, I thought it's a good time to learn what I believe will be an important skill. I did a few formal online courses and the lessons, projects and mentorship provided through those gave me the confidence to try to build this on my own. I hope you find it useful and it saves you some time.

If there is anything you want to know about the app or you have suggestions or comments please send me an message at admin@fromexceltotally.com