Prices from our October 2026 plan table, excluding GST. The Tally licence is the firm's own in both scenarios; we do not sell Tally.
The practice
A chartered accountancy firm in Ghaziabad. One partner, one senior accountant, one article. Forty client companies in TallyPrime on a Gold licence, all on one office PC. The partner spends half the week at client offices, and in GST season all three people want the books at the same time.
As things stand
The PC cost nothing extra and runs Tally perfectly well. The trouble is never speed. Only one person can use it at a time, because nobody has had an afternoon free to set up a LAN server. The partner carries backups to client offices on a pen drive and then has to merge the changes back, which goes wrong about once a quarter. Backups happen when someone remembers, onto an external disk in the same room as the PC. A power cut stops work. A disk failure would stop the practice.
The move
The same TallyPrime, installed with the firm's own Gold licence on a Windows server in our Tier IV datacenter in Noida (or in Mumbai, for a firm in the west). Each of the three gets a Windows login and opens Tally over Remote Desktop from the office, from home, or from a client's conference room. All three work in the same company file at once; Tally's own locking handles two people on one voucher, as it would on a LAN.
Sizing: three users and forty small companies sit comfortably on 8 GB. Start there and resize in place if the practice grows.
Cost: VPS-8 on Windows at ₹1,013 a month on annual billing, ₹1,299 monthly, plus the daily backup add-on. The Windows Server licence is in the price. Beyond two simultaneous Windows desktops you need Remote Desktop Services licences, which we add for the third user; ask us for that figure. GST at 18% applies and is claimable.
Setup: the firm sends a Tally backup. We provision the server, install TallyPrime with their licence, restore the forty companies, create the three logins, and the partner checks the figures against the PC. The PC stays as a fallback until the firm says otherwise. It takes about a day.
A Tuesday in July, afterwards
The article is entering purchase vouchers for one client while the senior accountant reconciles GSTR-2B for another, different companies on the same server. The partner, at a client's office in Noida, opens that client's books on a laptop over their Wi-Fi and reviews the live figures. No pen drive, nothing to merge. At 2 a.m. the backup add-on copies everything off the server; the last 48 hours are retained, and a weekly add-on, where offered, keeps the last weekly copy. The office loses power for an hour. The server, on 2N power in a Tier IV building, does not notice, and the partner carries on over mobile data.
What stays the same
The Tally is the same TallyPrime with the same licence. The data is the same company files. Reports, shortcuts and the day's routine are unchanged; the only new habit is clicking Remote Desktop instead of a desktop icon. The auditor logs in with a read-only Tally user as before.
When the firm should stay on the PC
If one person did all the Tally work at one desk, and a tested backup went off-site every evening without fail, the cloud would be a monthly cost for access nobody needs. The time to move is when two or more people need the books at once, when somebody needs them outside the office, or when the backup discipline is, honestly, not there.
Over three years
About ₹36,500 a year for the server on annual billing, plus the backup add-on and RDS licensing, plus GST. Against that: no LAN server to build, no pen drives, no merge errors, three people productive through GST season, and a practice that survives a dead disk. Most firms this size decide in an afternoon.
Questions we get asked
Do we need a new Tally licence? No. Your Gold licence installs on the server. Silver works too, one user at a time.
Can clients see their own books? Yes, with their own Windows login and a Tally user limited to their company.
What if the office internet goes down? Work from a phone hotspot. The server is not affected; the data was never on the office connection.
Who restores from backup? Our engineers, on request, from the add-on's retained copies. Manual Tally backups still work as well.
Is this the same as Tally.NET remote access? No. Tally.NET is limited and slower, routed through Tally's servers. This is the full program on your own server.
