If you deal in goods, of any type, you'll appreciate the Inventory capabilities in Tally.ERP 9. You can comprehensively record all types of inventory transactions, using goods receipt notes, delivery notes, stock journals, manufacturing journals and physical stock journals. All stock movements are fully recorded and maintained in stock registers.
Developed for all manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers or traders a small list of features are briefly described below:

Manufacturers:

• Bill of materials and Manufacturing Journals, to record material conversions
• Compound bill of materials support, for units that contain assemblies
• Multiple locations (godowns)
• Costing for jobs

Distributors & Wholesalers:

• Multiple price lists, with effective dates of applicability
• Use multiple units of measure (say KG's & grams)
• Dual units of measure (say KG's and bags, to support variations as happens in commodities)

Traders:

• High speed billing, with support for POS printers
• Bar code support
• Automatic application of taxes>
• Service billing
• Integrated sales return in bills
• Print bills (and any other document) in the customers language

Common features:

• You can choose to de-link the computed inventory value to automatically appear in your financial statements - and enter this figure manually.
• Stock ageing reports, to identify slow and non-moving stocks
• Invoice profitability reports to keep a pulse on sales
• Multi-currency transactions - buy and sell across the world - with integrated forex gain/loss calculations
• Physical stock take records to adjust physical vs. actual stocks
• Maintain batch & expiry details

A set of account books represents a 'company' in Tally.ERP 9. Therefore, if you decide to maintain your personal accounts you would create a 'company'. Many businesses do have more than one legal entity - and so will require multi-company support. Since each company is a distinct 'data base', building technical support for this is not difficult.
However, with multiple companies, several needs often arise beyond the mere facility to record transactions that need to be addressed,.
Principally, you would like to look at consolidated reports since these are often more meaningful to you than statutory reports of each company individually. You can therefore 'group' companies and have the reporting ability as if this were a 'company'. You could also 'group' these on demand or as required. So Partner A, could group companies in which he is a partner (say Companies P, Q & R) and Partner B could have a group with Companies Q, R & Y.

With multiple companies, you would probably need to compare them to see relative figures. In Tally.ERP 9, while seeing a report for Company P, you could pull up another column alongside that shows figures from Company Q (and any more companies). You can now continue to drill down the report and continue to see these comparisons.
Quiet often with multiple companies, the need arises to create the same ledgers & post transactions to more than one company. This can be accomplished with the click of a few keys - you save immense time by not having to re-enter data and avoid data entry errors.
In special circumstances, where there are needs like a Purchase Order entry becoming a Sales Order in another company, our Service Partners will be able to work with you, understand specific requirements and build a solution around the Data Synchronisation capability.
Security: With multiple companies, possibly including personal accounts, you may need to control who gets access to which companies, and to do what. You can set up users, grant or deny access - and these are defined for each company.

Remote Access: You choose to specify which company is accessible remotely. You choose which remote users have access; you decide what access a remote user gets. Central User Management: Users come and go. You might also have a password policy requiring users to change passwords every few weeks. You can take advantage of the ease of central user and password management that Tally.NET identities carry - and even remotely manage these while not in office.
A 'financial year' is truly suited to business reporting and statutory needs. In reality, business spans across financial years, so 'real needs' get constrained by these financial periods. As an example, receivables (Sundry Debtors) is an area that is frequently plagued by 'confusion' - the need to send reminders, resend statements of accounts and persistent follow up - may require that you need to look at figures from date 'x' to date 'y' - and one or more financial periods can be between these two dates. With Tally.ERP 9, you can specify any date range and perform any operation that you need to.

Comparison of Periods, say Q2 this year vs. Q2 last year, often required for shareholder and statutory reporting are easily accomplished.
You may also need to break up periods into smaller chunks, instead of the 'year'. While looking at the reports, you can instantly view them broken into periods of your choice (daily, monthly, quarterly etc). For studying trends, locating unusual figures, or comparing activities for different periods, this is invaluable.
Take the case of budgets. Say for a five year long project - and for various ledgers you need to have a budget set up for five years, another for each year, another two that are 2 ½ years... you can setup such budgets, and compare budget vs. actual for any!

In effect you can 'zoom out' as well as 'zoom in' to any period of your choice.
Any changes made or a transaction inserted anytime, are instantly carried forward - no matter how far back these are made (from a security standpoint, you might need to restrict data entry or changes to transactions prior to a specific date - this is available via the User security control features).

Even the simplest of organisations will have inventory in more than one physical location. As organisations get bigger, inventory will require active 'management' with more warehouses (godowns, as we call it in India), racks & shelves and stocks at project locations.

Take the case of multiple sales outlets, each with one godown. Each purchases items at different prices and sells them over time. You need to take a call on the value of stocks at each of these outlets as if they were independent units - and not apply the company average. With Tally.ERP 9, each outlet will act as an independent unit from a costing perspective. Sales from each outlet will reflect the appropriate cost, and not the company average (which can skew profitability of both outlets).

Seen at the company level, the cost behavior ignores these godowns - making reports and financial analysis appropriate at that level.
Godowns can contain godowns - to allow management to the bin level.
For various jobs (projects) and sub-jobs, the use of godowns and cost centres in Tally.ERP 9 give a high level of reporting and analysis - on inventory and financial aspects of jobs.

Budgets are a measure of the results expected for the planned activities for a company. Whether you formally plan budgets or not, you will be working against several budgets – Revenue, Production, Expense, Financial, Investment and so on.

Once these budgets are recorded, you would periodically want to check up how your business measures up against this plan. And once you get a handle on the variance, you would probably take decisions on course corrections - record possible outcomes of these changes (as scenarios) and compare against the budgets once again.
This is a powerful planning mechanism that provides the flexibility to work in a changing /dynamic environment.

With Tally.ERP 9, you can set up any number of budgets - and to make this easy, budgets can roll up into 'group' budgets and these can roll up again into 'master' budgets: the people who come up with the budgets can make entries and the roll-up is automatic (and can be overridden at the rolled up level as well).
While viewing any report, you can choose to pull up the budgeted figures as well, along with a variance column. You could just as easily pull up budget figures alone – and make these available to various people.

A 'scenario' is the name given to a specific combination of vouchers that will be included to deliver a report - you can include and exclude different voucher types and build as many scenarios as needed – say one where a product launch is on time and another where it is delayed by three months. You could then view actual figures against a scenario. You could also see the variance between a scenario and the budget!
Budgets and Scenarios are powerful tools when used by themselves; used together they deliver unprecedented power to help plan & monitor your business.