Notes
Engineering notes from real client work: what we built, why, and what it actually does in production.
GST, TDS and the general ledger inside a manufacturing ERP, with Tally optional
Shanti Boilers' operations system is also its book of record: chart of accounts, journal posting, GSTR-1, GSTR-3B, ITC reconciliation, TDS, reverse charge, fixed assets and bank reconciliation, with 23 reports and documents generated from the same data. Tally is an optional sync target, not the books. Statutory rates arrive daily from a human-verified registry.
Four ways to connect a business system to TallyPrime
TallyPrime has no cloud API — its integration gateway only listens on the PC that runs it — so every connection is a bridge on that machine. Ahrom Labs has built four: a local agent that posts approved entries from a cloud database; the same agent hardened for offices whose internet drops; an MCP server that gives applications and AI agents one set of Tally tools; and a CSV or JSON export and import for when nothing can be installed.
Generating a boiler's IBR statutory folder from its BOM and test certificates
Shanti Boilers ships every boiler with an IBR statutory folder for the Directorate of Boilers. The system builds it — cover letter, Forms II(1), III, III A and IV A — from the project's bill-of-materials tree and a bank of material test certificates, each unique on cert, cast and plate number and reused across about 3.2 boilers in the sample.
Seven signs your business has outgrown Tally — and what fixed each one
You've outgrown Tally when the work happens outside it: invoices typed twice, a parallel Excel for production, sales asking accounts for outstanding balances, stock Tally can't describe. Replacing Tally is rarely the fix — in one system we built, Tally stays as the books and approved invoices post into it within 30 seconds.
Putting steel plate offcuts back into stock, by weight derived from geometry
At Shanti Boilers, every cut of a plate or section records what was used and what usable remnant was kept; the system derives every weight from dimensions and density, returns the remnant to stock for a later project, and books the rest as scrap. A 157.00 kg plate became 127.17 kg used, 15.70 kg remnant and 14.13 kg scrap — conserved exactly.
Keeping GST, TDS and income-tax rates current across every system
Ahrom Labs keeps statutory rates — GST by HSN code, vendor TDS, income-tax and professional-tax slabs, PF and ESI — in one registry built to serve every system it builds, with Shanti Boilers' system the first connected. A person checks each change against the actual CBIC or CBDT notification, a change goes live only once approved, installs pull approved rates daily, and a wrong rate is retracted rather than edited.
Tally, ERPNext, Odoo or a custom ERP: how a manufacturer should choose
Stay on TallyPrime if the need is accounting with simple stock. Choose ERPNext or Odoo when your processes match what they ship. Build custom when the workflow is the business — IBR paperwork, piece-level plate traceability, two companies on one book. Shanti Boilers planned an ERPNext integration for accounting, then built its own ledger instead.
The same confidence score, two different autonomy rules
Two match-suggestion systems in the same manufacturing app score candidates identically — a Laplace-smoothed approval ratio, promoted at 75% confidence with at least 3 prior approvals. One auto-applies its top match. The other never does, no matter how confident the score, because it decides what goes on a statutory quality-control document.
AI extraction with a human in the loop, five document types
Five document types — purchase invoices, freight invoices, bills of entry, purchase orders, bank statements — get extracted by an LLM reading the PDF directly, no separate OCR step. Zero-correction rates run 88-95% depending on type, purchase orders highest, bills of entry lowest. Every extraction still goes through a human review before anything is approved or posted.
Posting vouchers into TallyPrime from a cloud app
A local agent, running on the same PC as TallyPrime, polls a cloud app's database every 30 seconds and posts approved invoices into Tally's local XML gateway, syncing voucher status every 15 minutes and master data nightly. Missing ledgers and real rejections are held for a person; connection failures retry automatically until Tally is reachable again.
Two companies, one book
Savistar and Saag — sister companies, same owners — share one client list and one combined finance ledger in a single app, not a multi-tenant system. The real structure is in who can see what: staff see only their own cash entries, and bank data is rejected outright for any staff request, enforced at the API, not just hidden in the UI.