Print Envelopes Directly from TallyPrime Instead of Writing Them by Hand

Walk into most trading offices at the end of a working day and you will find someone copying addresses onto envelopes by hand, reading them off a screen or a printed ledger.

It is worth pausing on how odd that is. Those addresses are already stored, already typed, already correct. They are sitting in the party master in TallyPrime. Someone is copying data out of a computer, by hand, onto paper, and introducing typing mistakes on the way.

What this actually costs

The time is the obvious part. Thirty envelopes at a minute each is half an hour, every time you do a dispatch or a mailing.

The errors are the expensive part. A hand-copied address gets a digit wrong in the PIN code, or a line dropped, and the envelope comes back three weeks later. If that envelope contained a cheque, a statement of account, or a legal notice, the cost is considerably more than the half hour.

And there is a third cost that owners rarely count: the address in Tally quietly stops being the master copy. Once people are used to writing addresses from memory or from an old list, nobody updates the party master when a customer moves. The data decays because nothing depends on it being right.

The customisation

We print envelopes directly from TallyPrime, pulling the address straight from the party ledger.

In practice that means you select the parties you are posting to and print. The address that comes out is the address in your books. If it is wrong on the envelope, it is wrong in Tally, and you fix it once, in the place where it belongs.

The same approach works for address labels if you use them, and for printing addresses on covering letters and statements.

The video above shows it running so you can see the flow end to end.

Why standard TallyPrime does not do this

TallyPrime is built around vouchers and reports. Printing is designed for documents that come out of your accounting: invoices, challans, statements, reminder letters.

An envelope is not an accounting document. It is a piece of stationery with one party’s address on it, laid out to match a specific envelope size. There is no standard report for that, which is why it needs a customisation. The layout has to match the envelope you actually buy, and that differs from business to business.

This is a good example of what TDL customisation is genuinely for. It is not a dramatic change to how your accounting works. It removes one manual step that should never have been manual.

Things worth deciding before you start

If you want this done, have answers ready for these, because they shape the layout:

• What size envelope do you use? Standard sizes vary and the layout must match.
• Do you want your own return address printed as well, or is it pre-printed?
• Do you post to the party’s registered address or a separate delivery address?
• Do you need to print one at a time, or a batch for a dispatch run?

None of these are complicated, but getting them settled up front avoids reprinting a box of envelopes with the margins wrong.

A small thing that adds up

We like this customisation because it is unglamorous and it works. Nobody is going to put “we print our envelopes automatically” in a company profile. But the half hour comes back every week, the returned post stops, and the addresses in your books stay current because they are finally being used for something.

If your team is still writing envelopes by hand, talk to us. We are a Tally 3 Star Partner in Himmatnagar, Gujarat.