Business Software: ERP, CRM, MIS and Tally Basics

Business software is application software written to run the work of an organisation rather than the work of a single user: keeping accounts, paying salaries, tracking stock, handling customers and producing reports for managers. Computer Awareness papers in banking, SSC and railway exams ask the full forms, what each category does, and which company makes which well-known product. The categories below are the ones examiners use.

Information systems by level of management

Organisations are usually drawn as a pyramid with three levels of management, and a different kind of system serves each. A transaction processing system, or TPS, serves the operational level and records routine day-to-day transactions such as sales, deposits, bookings and payroll entries; accuracy and speed matter more than analysis. A management information system, or MIS, serves middle management and turns the transaction data into periodic summary and exception reports that answer structured, repeating questions. A decision support system, or DSS, serves managers facing semi-structured problems, with models that let the user ask what-if questions and compare options. An executive information system, also called an executive support system, serves top management with highly summarised indicators and trends for unstructured, strategic decisions. Two more categories complete the list: office automation systems for documents, mail and scheduling, and knowledge management systems for storing and sharing expertise.

ERP: enterprise resource planning

ERP software replaces separate departmental programs with one integrated package built around a single shared database, so that a sales order entered once updates stock, production planning, dispatch, accounts receivable and the general ledger together. Its usual modules are finance and accounting, human resources and payroll, materials and inventory, manufacturing and production planning, sales and distribution, purchase and procurement, and quality. The benefits examiners name are a single source of data, removal of duplicate entry, standard processes across branches and faster reporting; the costs are a long implementation, expensive customisation and the need to retrain staff. Well-known products include SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics and Infor, with Odoo and the Indian ERPNext as open-source options. Modern packages are often sold as cloud services on subscription, which is called software as a service.

CRM, SCM and business intelligence

Customer relationship management software holds everything a firm knows about its customers and prospects: contact records, enquiries, calls, complaints, campaigns and purchase history. It is divided into operational CRM, which runs sales, marketing and service tasks such as lead and campaign management; analytical CRM, which mines customer data for segments and buying patterns; and collaborative CRM, which shares the customer view across departments and partners. Salesforce is the best-known cloud product, with Zoho from India and Microsoft Dynamics 365 among the other names. Supply chain management software plans demand, purchase, warehousing and logistics across suppliers and distributors. Business intelligence tools sit on top of a data warehouse and present dashboards, key performance indicators and drill-down reports; the processing style for analysis is called online analytical processing, or OLAP, as against the online transaction processing, or OLTP, of the systems that capture the data. Finding patterns and relationships in such large stores of data is data mining.

Tally and accounting software

Tally, a product of Tally Solutions of Bengaluru, is the accounting package most widely asked about in Indian exams. The company was founded in 1986 by Shyam Sunder Goenka and Bharat Goenka, and its later versions added inventory, payroll, statutory returns and goods and services tax features; the current product line is TallyPrime. The screen a user reaches after opening a company is called the Gateway of Tally. Work is entered as vouchers, and the voucher types are the examinable list: payment, receipt, contra for transfers between cash and bank or between two bank accounts, journal for adjustments, sales, purchase, debit note, credit note and memorandum. Accounts are kept as ledgers, every ledger belongs to a group, and the software then produces the trial balance, profit and loss account, balance sheet, day book, stock summary and ratio analysis without further entry. Other names in the same space are Marg and Busy among Indian packages, and QuickBooks and Zoho Books among cloud products.