Every firm we talk to believes the same thing at first: running Tally on the office desktop is free. You already bought the machine. There is no monthly bill. What is there to compare?
So we did the exercise properly with a nine-person CA firm in Pune. Not estimates — their actual invoices, over three years.
What the office setup actually costs
The desktop running Tally was not the expense. The expense was everything standing behind it.
- A server-grade machine that could handle nine concurrent users, replaced once in the period
- A UPS, plus a battery replacement in year two
- An annual maintenance contract with the local hardware vendor
- A part-time IT engineer on call — billed per visit, and there were more visits than anyone remembered
- An external hard drive for backups that someone had to remember to plug in
- Two days of lost billing when the power supply failed during audit season
That last line is the one nobody budgets for. When the machine holding your live books goes down in the third week of September, the cost is not the repair. It is the work that does not happen.
What moving to cloud replaced
On cloud, the firm paid a flat per-user monthly fee. That fee absorbed the server, the redundancy, the backups, the patching, and the support engineer. There was no hardware to replace, no AMC to renew, and no battery to buy.
The partner’s summary was blunt: the monthly bill was visible in a way the old costs never were, and that visibility was uncomfortable at first. But when they compared three years against three years, the cloud figure was lower — and that was before counting the two days they got back.
Where the savings actually came from
Not from the hardware, interestingly. Hardware is a one-time cost that people amortise in their heads until it feels like nothing. The savings came from three quieter places:
- Support calls that stopped happening, because there was no local machine to fail
- Backup discipline that stopped depending on a human remembering
- Audit-season downtime that went to zero
When the local PC still wins
We will be honest about this, because pretending otherwise wastes your time. A single-user practice with one accountant, no branches, no CA needing remote access, and a reliable machine — that setup is hard to beat on pure cost. Cloud earns its keep when there is more than one person, more than one location, or more than one device.
How to run this maths for your own firm
Pull three years of invoices and add up: hardware purchases, AMC renewals, UPS and battery, every IT visit, and any storage bought for backups. Then estimate the hours lost to failures. Divide by 36 and compare it to a per-user monthly quote. Most firms are surprised in the same direction.
Want us to run this comparison on your numbers? We will do it honestly — including telling you if staying local is the better call.