What to fix before you move off Tally

Every business we take off Tally has the same three problems hiding in its data: the same customer entered four times with slightly different spellings, item names that only one person can decode, and opening balances that were never fully reconciled after some year in the past.

You can migrate all of it. We would rather you didn't. A messy chart of accounts carried into a new system becomes a messy new system, except now more people can see it.

So the first fortnight of a Kokam project is usually not implementation at all. It is a cleanup: one canonical customer list, an item naming scheme somebody can explain in a sentence, a decision about which ledgers you actually report on.

We do this with your accountant in the room, not over email. Half the questions can only be answered by the person who remembers why an account was opened in the first place.

The payoff is immediate. When your masters are clean, the reports you have been asking for become simple queries instead of a week of reconciliation. Stock valuation stops depending on one person's memory.

Plan for it. A migration quoted without a cleanup phase is a migration that will happen twice.