Computer Awareness Quiz: Business Software: ERP, CRM, MIS and Tally

An ERP package replaces separate departmental programs with one integrated suite built on a single shared database, so a transaction entered once flows through stock, production, dispatch and the ledger.

Customer relationship management software keeps the record of every dealing with a customer or prospect, including contacts, enquiries, calls, complaints, campaigns and purchase history, and is divided into operational, analytical and collaborative CRM.

Tally, from Tally Solutions of Bengaluru, keeps ledgers and groups, takes entries as vouchers, and produces the trial balance, profit and loss account, balance sheet, day book and stock summary without separate work; later versions added inventory, payroll and tax features, and the current line is TallyPrime.

A TPS serves the operational level, capturing sales, deposits, bookings, issues of material and payroll entries as they happen, where accuracy, speed and reliability matter more than analysis; it is also the source of the data that higher systems later summarise.

All three are sold as enterprise resource planning suites, with modules for finance, human resources, materials, manufacturing and sales working on one shared database; Infor belongs to the same list, and Odoo and the Indian ERPNext are the open-source examples.

A decision support system is interactive and model-based: it holds data, models and a user interface so that a manager can change assumptions, run alternatives and compare outcomes on problems that are neither wholly routine nor wholly open-ended, such as pricing a product, choosing a warehouse site or planning a…

After a company is created or selected, the user reaches the Gateway of Tally, from which the masters, vouchers, reports and utilities are opened; it is the screen named in question papers because every later action starts there.

A contra voucher records movements that do not change the total funds of the business but only shift them between cash and bank or between two bank accounts, which is why both sides of the entry are the firm's own accounts.

Online analytical processing answers few but complex queries that aggregate, slice and compare historical data held in a data warehouse, which is what business intelligence dashboards and drill-down reports rest on.

Salesforce is the best-known customer relationship management product delivered as a cloud service, used over a browser on subscription, with Zoho from India and Microsoft Dynamics 365 among the other names in the category.

Data mining applies statistical and machine learning techniques to large stores of data to find knowledge that was not asked for in advance: customer segments, associations between products bought together, trends over time and unusual cases that may be fraud.

Both are enterprise resource planning packages distributed as open-source software, so the source code can be studied and modified, and both are deployed by small and medium firms that cannot meet the cost of a large proprietary suite; ERPNext is the Indian entry in the category.