Multiple Tally companies in one account

Why businesses end up with several companies

Few owners plan for it. A business starts as a proprietorship, adds a partnership for a new product line, opens a branch in another state that needs its own GST registration, and later sets up a private limited company. Sometimes each financial year was kept as a separate Tally company in the past. Each set of books is legitimate and separate, but the owner thinks about them together. See managing multiple companies in Tally for the different ways to structure this.

How it works in Cashflow OS

The connector on the Tally PC reads the companies open in TallyPrime and keeps a synced copy of each. In the app or web app, every linked company appears in your account and you switch between them. Each company keeps its own:

• ledgers, items, outstanding and reports;
• GST views and JSON, since each GSTIN files separately;
• team and roles: owner, admin, accountant, staff, salesperson;
• setting for writing into Tally, which is off until the owner switches it on;
• add-on modules, which are switched on per company.

A worked example: one family, three companies

The owner sees all three. The counter staff see only the retail company. The salespeople see items and their own customers in the distribution company and nothing of the other two. The CA, invited with the accountant role, sees the new unit's books for review. Nobody needed a separate login per company, and nobody sees more than their job requires.

Who benefits most

• Family businesses with firms in several names. See family business succession and books.
• Multi-branch businesses with a Tally company per branch or per state; see our page for multi-branch businesses.
• CAs and accountants who are invited into several companies and switch between them.

Separate books, separate GST

Each Tally company usually maps to its own GSTIN, and that is exactly how the GST views work in Cashflow OS: you open the company, then its GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B views, prepared from that company's data, with that company's JSON for the portal. There is no risk of a sale in one firm appearing in another firm's return, because the data never mixes. For a business with a branch in another state, the branch company's return is reviewed on its own. Filing is done on the GST portal for each registration. This is general information, not tax advice.

The same separation helps at year-end. Each firm's CA can be invited only to the firm they audit, and reports for any financial year, or custom ranges across years, can be exported per company for loan files and audits.

Tips

• Name companies clearly in Tally, with the firm and branch name, so the picker is unambiguous on a small screen.
• Keep the companies open in Tally on the PC where the connector runs, or their data will not stay current.
• Invite people per company, not to everything by default.
• Keep ledger and item names consistent across companies if you plan to combine exported reports in Excel.
• Turn modules on only where they are used, so each company's screens stay simple.

Comparing companies side by side

Because each company is a separate set of books, Cashflow OS shows them separately. To compare, pick the same date range in each, export Profit & Loss or outstanding to Excel, and put them side by side. A useful pair of numbers for each firm is monthly sales and receivables outstanding: a firm selling ₹30,00,000 a month with ₹60,00,000 outstanding is carrying about two months of sales on credit, while one selling ₹20,00,000 with ₹20,00,000 outstanding carries one. The second firm turns sales into cash twice as fast, even though it is smaller.

What it does not do

• It does not merge companies into one consolidated set of accounts; each Tally company stays separate.
• It does not move data between companies; inter-company entries are still made in each company's books.
• A company's data stays current only while it is open in Tally with the connector running.