Custom Tally reports without TDL. Just ask.

For years, getting a report out of Tally the way you actually wanted it meant one of two things. You learned to live with the standard reports, or you paid a TDL developer to build a custom one.

TDL, or Tally Definition Language, is the programming language that customises Tally. It is powerful, and for some jobs you still need it. But for the most common request, which is simply seeing your own numbers in a different cut, there is now a faster way. You can ask.

The old way

Say you want sales by item for one branch, this quarter, sorted by margin. In standard Tally you filter and configure the nearest report and hope it gets close. If it does not, you brief a TDL developer, wait a few days, pay for the work, and then carry that customisation through every Tally update. For a single question, that is a lot of effort for one answer.

The new way

With The Usual Accountant, your Tally connects to the AI assistant you already use, such as ChatGPT or Claude. Instead of describing a report to a developer, you describe it to the assistant in plain language and get it back from your live data. For example:

• sales by item for the Hyderabad branch this quarter, highest margin first
• top ten customers by sales this year, with their outstanding balance
• purchases from a supplier over the last six months, month by month
• the expenses that grew the most compared to last quarter

Each of these would once have been a custom report request. Now it is a sentence. If the cut is not quite right, you refine it in the next sentence, the same way you would ask a colleague to look again.

Where TDL still belongs

This is about reports and views, not everything. TDL is still the right tool when you need to change how Tally itself works or prints. Custom invoice and document formats, new data entry screens, special vouchers, and printed layouts are TDL territory, and asking an assistant does not replace that.

So the honest split is simple. If you want to see your data a particular way, ask. If you want to change how Tally looks, prints, or captures entries, that is still a TDL job.

Why this matters

Most custom report requests are not really about building software. They are about one person wanting one answer in one shape. Paying for code and waiting days for that is the part that never made sense. When the AI you already use can read your books and shape the answer on request, the custom report stops being a project and becomes a question.

If you have ever waited on a TDL developer just to see your own numbers a different way, that wait is now optional.