Quanta
A mobile companion for Tally, built for owners who can’t reach their own numbers.
Overview
Quanta is a mobile companion for Tally — India’s default accounting software for over 2.7M businesses. It gives SMB owners and department heads an at-a-glance view of their business’s financial health, anywhere, anytime. It surfaces Tally data in a form a non-expert can actually read.
Role
End-to-end research & design (sole designer)
Team
1 Designer (me)
3 Developers
Director
Founder
Tally Domain Expert
Tools
Figma
Claude
Duration
4 weeks
The Problem
Comprehensive but built for power users: Tally covers billing, financial reporting, inventory, payroll, banking, and tax compliance, but its accounting-heavy interface caters primarily to accountants.
Desktop-dependent: Accessing business information requires a desktop, limiting flexibility for business owners on the go.
Information is hard to access: The data exists in Tally, but finding the right information at the right moment is difficult.
Jay is at a client meeting when his supplier calls: “Your payment is due today!” Jay thinks he’s already paid but can’t check Tally on his office desktop.
He calls his accountant, who’s busy and promises to check and call back.
By the time the answer arrives, the moment has passed. A 30-second check took half a day.
Research & discovery
Given a 4-week timeline, I focused research on cadence and priority rather than exhaustive discovery:
01.
4 User Interviews
Owners and department/sales heads, focused on what they check and how often, not feature wishlists.
02.
Shadowing Tally Expert
Familiarised myself with Tally desktop app and its concepts taught myself Tally by shadowing a domain expert.
03.
Competitive Analysis
Compared 5 competitors based on their adoption, information architecture and features covered.
Making data accessible was only half the problem.
Making it actionable was the real challenge
Business owners didn’t just need access to financial information away from their desks. They needed to understand their business at a glance, identify what required attention, and take action without delays or depending on an accountant.
This meant designing Quanta around three principles:
Understand
Surface relevant information in familiar, business-oriented language instead of accounting terminology.
Prioritise
Prioritize information that helps users identify outstanding payments, track business performance, and spot inventory issues.
Act
Connect information to the next step, whether that’s following up on a payment, contacting a customer, or deciding to reorder stock.
Key design decisions
#1
Shaping the MVP
Each potential feature was evaluated through a product lens before entering the experience.
User need & frequency: What did users need most often in their daily business flow?
Level of financial detail: How much detail did each workflow need for confident decisions?
Technical feasibility: What could realistically be supported in the MVP timeline?
Expense tracking
Invoice creation
Expense tracking was deprioritized as inconsistent expense logging and post-entry approvals led to unreliable data.
Invoice creation was deprioritized due to the development complexity of writing invoice data back to Tally.
#2
Sales tells me how my business is doing. Outstanding tells me what I need to do.
Early explorations placed sales and outstanding together on Home. Sales helped users understand business performance, while Outstanding required investigation and action. I therefore gave Outstanding its own feature.
The experience evolved from showing a number to supporting a workflow: users could see who owed them, who they owed, investigate transactions, send reminders and share invoices.
Before
Home listed Sales and Outstanding along with other metrics
After
Home displays Sales along with alerts. Outstanding is its own feature allowing investigation workflow.
#3
Making party information actionable
The initial Parties screen listed customers and suppliers alphabetically, making users search for recently relevant contacts. I introduced a Recent activity section to surface them upfront.
In Party Details, I added outstanding balances linked to detailed outstanding records, helping users quickly answer payment-related queries without digging through transactions.
Before
Parties displayed alphabetically into tabs for Customers and Vendors.
After
Recent activity section surfaces parties upfront. Customers and Vendors act as filters. Party details show outstanding records.
#4
Simplifying stock tracking
The early designs focused on stock prices, but knowing prices alone wasn’t actionable enough, especially as purchase prices fluctuated. To help users make informed stock decisions, I prioritized quantities and introduced In Stock, Out of Stock, and Negative Stock filters to highlight items needing attention. Groups and Categories became tabs for easier stock navigation.
Before
Stock information prioritised prices. Transactions specific to items were buried under ledgers and parties.
After
Prioritized stock quantities and status filters to enable actionable decisions, and surfaced item-specific sales and purchase transactions directly on the Item Details screen
#5
Designing for data freshness
Tally users manage multiple companies, each with its own books. I made company switching explicit and kept sync status tied to each company.
Since syncing required connection to user's desktop setup, I added Sync Now button to Home for quicker access. Most screens used the past seven days as the default date range so I also explored dynamically setting the date range based on the last sync, but this introduced loading delays. The trade-off was to retain a default seven-day range and display a persistent Syncing reminder if last sync was over 24 hours to communicate data freshness without compromising performance.
Before
Sync now button was placed in the companies drawer accessible through home page.
After
Sync now button surfaced on homepage itself for quicker access. Persistent reminder for syncing if last sync was over 24 hours.
