Weighing Factura Financials against the Tally you already run.
Written for a Ghanaian business that keeps its books in Tally and is deciding whether to move. It covers what actually changes day to day, what the move involves, what stays the same, and the case for staying where you are.
Who this is for
You keep books in Tally, you file VAT in Ghana, and something about the current arrangement has started to cost you time: a second set of companies kept apart by hand, a stock figure that has to be argued with, a report nobody can trace back to a document without opening a file cabinet.
Factura Financials is an accounting, sales, purchasing, stock and production system. It launched in 2004 and it is compliant in Ghana, the UAE, Bahrain and Bangladesh today. It is a separate application from Factura HRMS, with its own login.
Who should stay on Tally
Tally is a capable, widely used accounting package, and a great many businesses in Ghana run on it without a problem worth solving. If your books are one company, your reporting is a trial balance and a P&L at year end, and the person who keeps them is comfortable and not overloaded, a move will cost you a migration and give you back very little. Stay.
The same is true if your Tally is heavily customised in TDL and those customisations are how the business actually works. Factura's Tally import reads Tally's standard master and voucher structure, not a customised one, so a TDL-heavy setup means re-creating in Factura whatever those customisations do. That is a real project and worth being honest about before anyone starts.
We would rather tell you that now than find it in month three.
What changes day to day
Four differences that show up in ordinary work rather than in a feature list.
- Every figure opens the document behind it.
- A line on the trial balance is not a picture of a number. Open it and you get the ledgers underneath, still adding to the figure you came from, and open one of those and you reach the voucher a person entered. The three statements are read off the same postings in the same run, so they cannot disagree with each other.
- One posting pipeline.
- A journal, a sales invoice and a manufacturing journal all save through the same voucher engine, which is why the registers behind them are the same report filtered differently. The stock, sales and purchasing modules post into the ledger on the way through rather than at the end of a period.
- Multi-company with a hard boundary.
- Each company you keep books for is its own database, so one company's postings can never be read into another's trial balance by accident. You switch between them inside the product. Group totals across companies — balance sheet, profit and loss and cash flow side by side with a combined column — come from Factura Desktop.
- Ghana VAT and the levies, modelled separately.
- NHIL and the GETFund levy are carried in their own buckets against their own configurable ledgers, not folded into one tax figure. A boxed Ghana VAT return report gives you VAT on sales and outputs, total purchases, VAT reclaimed on purchases, acquisitions and supplies. A dedicated plugin submits invoices to the GRA's E-VAT service and stores the signed-invoice metadata that comes back. The COVID-19 levy bucket is still carried and computes nothing, the levy having been abolished with effect from 1 January 2026.
Factura does not file your return. The return report produces the figures in the shape the boxes expect; submitting them stays with you or your accountant. Withholding tax is captured the same way, a withholding ledger and an amount recorded against the payment voucher as you make it, but Factura does not produce a withholding tax certificate and does not file a withholding return.
Where the documents post
Stock, sales and purchasing are not separate ledgers that get reconciled afterwards.
- Sales.
- The delivery note releases stock from the godown it left, and the valuation moves with it. The invoice opens the receivable and the ledger entry, against the right cost centre. Orders sit outside the ledger until invoiced, so a pipeline does not distort your trial balance or your stock figure.
- Purchasing.
- The receipt note brings stock into the godown it landed in; the supplier invoice opens the bill you owe. Freight, duty and handling fold into the landed value of the stock rather than being expensed away from it.
- Stock.
- Items, units, groups and godowns, valued by a method you choose. Valuation is recalculated when an invoice or a point-of-sale line posts, so the value you read is the value the last document left behind. Opening and closing stock appear on the profit and loss for the period, off the same valuation.
- What the ageing rests on.
- The receivables and payables views and the bill-wise reports are the same figures; each links straight through to the report by its own report id, so the screen and the report cannot disagree.
Module detail, page by page: General Ledger · Sales & Invoicing · Purchasing · Inventory
What moving involves
A one-time, file-based import and three steps around it. Nothing switches until the balances agree.
- Bring your balancesA guided wizard reads Tally's own XML export and brings your chart of accounts, ledgers with opening balances, cost centres, stock, godowns, price lists, voucher types and vouchers into Factura Financials. Chart of accounts, customers, suppliers, opening balances and stock can also come in from Excel. We map it with you.
- Set your structureCost centres, price levels, approval limits and document templates configured to your business. This is also where anything your TDL customisations were doing gets re-created.
- Agree the balances, then switchWe agree your opening trial balance against your current Tally books before you move over. A period run in parallel is available where you want the extra assurance.
What the import does not carry
Five things, worth planning for rather than discovering: TDL customisations, Tally's payroll masters and transactions, file attachments and images, historical exchange-rate tables, and Tally's own alteration and audit trail. The import brings the data as it stands, not the history of how it got there.
It is a one-time import in one direction, not an ongoing sync. Tally-Bridge is a separate feature that does the opposite job, pushing Factura's masters out to a live Tally session, and is a different conversation from moving your books in.
What stays the same
- Your chart of accounts.
- It comes across, and it stays yours. Nothing forces you onto a template.
- Your accountant.
- Over 100 standard reports export to Excel, so whatever your accountant already asks for in a spreadsheet keeps arriving in one.
- Who files.
- Filing the VAT return and remitting stay with you, on the GRA's own channels, exactly as they do now.
- Where it runs.
- Factura Financials runs on the web and on the desktop, with a mobile sales app. Hosting is your choice on every platform: your own servers, or hosted by us.
- Payroll, if it is elsewhere.
- If you run Factura HRMS, payroll arrives as a coded journal you import, review and post. If your payroll sits somewhere else, the same import route takes a coded journal from it. They remain two separate applications with two logins.
Before you ask us
Do we have to re-key our history?
No. The import wizard reads Tally's own XML export and brings across masters and vouchers, including opening balances with their bill-wise breakup. Bring a clean, final export and review what landed against your Tally books before you rely on it.
Can we keep more than one company?
Yes, and each one is a separate database, so one company's postings cannot be read into another's trial balance. You switch between them inside the product. Totals across a group of companies come from Factura Desktop.
Does Factura file our VAT return?
No. It produces a boxed Ghana VAT return report with the figures in the shape the boxes expect, and it submits invoices to the GRA's electronic invoicing service through a dedicated plugin. Filing the return and paying stay with you or your accountant.
Can we run both systems for a while?
What always happens is that we agree your opening trial balance against the books you already trust before you switch. A period run in parallel is available on top of that where you want the extra assurance; it is not part of every move.
What is the audit trail?
Records carry who created and modified them and when. That is stamping, not a field-by-field change history, and Factura does not keep a before-and-after of every edit. Separately, a general ledger audit monitor counts and values the entry types a review asks about first: manual journals, unconfirmed drafts, cancellations and credit notes.
See a month close, end to end
Thirty minutes. Post, reconcile, report — and you can stop us anywhere.