Moving from Tally? Start with your item list.
There is no “Import from Tally” button in Lekhita and we are not going to pretend there is. What there is: a CSV import you can do yourself in about fifteen minutes, and a person who will do it for you for free if you would rather not. Both are below, in full.
First, decide which move you are actually making
Replacing Tally
You use Tally mainly to make bills and track parties, you do not run cost centres or bills of material, and your CA works from your figures rather than from your Tally file. This is a real move and the rest of this page is for you.
Adding Lekhita alongside Tally
Far more common, and often the right answer. Lekhita runs the counter — billing, udhaar, bookings, the phone in your hand — and Tally stays where the accounting and the filing happen. You still want the item and party import below; you just never switch Tally off.
Do it yourself, tonight
Fifteen minutes, no waiting on us. This is the same importer built for merchants pasting from a shop diary, so it is forgiving about what your sheet looks like.
Export the masters from Tally
In Tally Prime: Gateway of Tally → Display More Reports → List of Accounts for your parties, and your Stock Summary for items. Export each one, choosing Excel or CSV as the format rather than XML. If your CA runs Tally for you, this is a two-minute favour to ask.
Tidy the sheet to two or three columns
Open the export and delete everything except the columns in the table below. Name and price for items; name and phone for parties. You do not have to rename headers — Lekhita matches common names, including Hindi ones like naam and daam — but you do have to remove Tally's report header rows above the actual data.
Copy the rows and paste them into Lekhita
Open the item list (or customer list) in Lekhita, choose import, and paste. Lekhita shows you which column it matched to which field before anything is created, so you can back out if it guessed wrong. Rupee symbols, commas in numbers and Devanagari digits are all handled.
Check twenty rows against Tally
Not all of them — twenty. Your fastest movers, your most expensive item, and anything with an unusual name. If those twenty are right, the rest almost certainly are.
The exact column names Lekhita accepts
You do not need to match these exactly — any one of the names in the right-hand column will be recognised, in any order, with or without a header row. Published here so you can check your sheet before you open the app.
Items
Catalogue → the import action on the item list
| Field | Needed? | Header names it recognises |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Required | name, item, item name, product, product name, title, naam |
| Price | Required | price, rate, MRP, amount, selling price, sale price, unit price, daam |
| Stock | Optional | stock, qty, quantity, units, inventory, count |
| Category | Optional | category, group, section, type |
Customers & parties
Customers → the import action on the customer list
| Field | Needed? | Header names it recognises |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Required | name, customer, customer name, full name, naam |
| Phone | Required | phone, mobile, phone number, mobile number, contact, whatsapp, number |
| Optional | email, email id, mail, email address |
Or send it to us and we will do it
Free for early-access members, and genuinely free — not a trial of a paid service. Export whatever Tally gives you most easily, including the full XML from Export → Masters → All Masters if that is simpler, and email it to hello@lekhita.com or send it on WhatsApp. A person maps it, loads it, and sanity-checks the result — names, prices, phone numbers. Sent in the evening, it is in your account the next morning, and we will get on a short call to walk through what landed.
Use this path if you want opening udhaar balances carried over, if your export is a mess, or if you simply have a shop to run.
What carries across
- Item names, selling prices, opening stock counts and the group they sit in.
- Party names with their phone numbers — your customers and your suppliers as contacts.
- Email addresses, where your Tally masters have them.
What stays in Tally
- Your voucher history. Lekhita starts your transaction record fresh from the day you begin billing; Tally remains the archive for closed years, which is what your CA will want for past filings anyway.
- Ledger structure — groups, sub-groups, cost centres, the chart of accounts. Lekhita is a counter and an order book, not a double-entry package, and it does not have a place to put them.
- Outstanding udhaar balances. These do not come through the CSV path — tell us the opening balances and we will set them, or start each khata from the next bill.
- GST rates and HSN codes per item. The importer does not carry them; add HSN on your items in Lekhita before you rely on a tax invoice.
Run both for one month, and check these four things
Every merchant who switched systems and regretted it skipped this step. One calendar month of double entry is a small price for finding out in week two rather than at filing time.
- Daily: does Lekhita's day-end total match what you actually took? If not, find the bill before you go home.
- Weekly: does your udhaar list in Lekhita match the outstanding you would have written in the copy?
- Month-end: compare the month's turnover in Lekhita against Tally's. They should agree to the rupee. If they do not, the difference is a bill someone forgot to ring up — which is exactly the leak the app is meant to close.
- After one clean month: stop entering sales in Tally. Keep Tally for accounting and filing if your CA wants it.
When Lekhita fits — and when Tally still wins
Lekhita is the right move if you...
- Run a shop, a service business or bookings — billing, udhaar khata and appointments in one app.
- Want billing, khata and your customer list on a phone, not on a Windows desktop that stays in the back room.
- Are GST-unregistered, or registered and billing consumers and straightforward B2B.
- Want a free store page and WhatsApp sharing built into the same app that bills.
Stay on Tally if you...
- Run a manufacturing or BOM-based operation, job costing, or production journals.
- Need cost centres, a real chart of accounts, or double-entry books that stand up to audit.
- Are above the e-invoicing turnover limit and must issue IRN-signed invoices — Lekhita cannot generate those. See GST in Lekhita for the full list of what our invoice does and does not carry.
- Have a CA team whose workflow requires Tally Prime files.
We build Lekhita for Indian shops and service businesses. We are not — and do not pretend to be — a Tally replacement for accounting.
Import your items tonight, bill from Lekhita tomorrow
Free while Lekhita is in early access — the app and the migration both. No card, no trial clock.