How to Alter, Delete, and Display Vouchers in Tally ERP.9

Every accountant makes typing errors. A wrong amount, a misspelled ledger name, or a voucher posted under the wrong head is common when you are entering dozens of transactions in a day. The good news is that Tally.ERP 9 does not force you to start over. It lets you open any voucher you have already saved, correct it, or remove it altogether, without disturbing the rest of your books. This is exactly what makes computerised accounting more forgiving than a manual cash book, where a mistake often meant scratching out an entry or starting a fresh page. Understanding how to view, alter, and delete voucher entries correctly is one of the first practical skills a commerce student needs before working with real company data.

Why voucher correction matters in Tally 🔗

A voucher is the source document for every transaction recorded in Tally, whether it is a payment, receipt, sales invoice, purchase entry, or journal adjustment. Since every financial transaction is entered into the ledgers through the appropriate voucher, an error at the voucher stage flows straight into the trial balance, the profit and loss account, and the balance sheet. If a purchase is entered against the wrong supplier ledger, the payables report for that supplier will be wrong until the voucher is corrected. This is why the ability to alter or delete a voucher is not a minor convenience. It is central to keeping the books accurate.

At the same time, correction should never be casual. In a real organisation, changing a voucher after it has been used to generate an invoice, file a GST return, or issue a cheque can create mismatches between what the customer, the bank, or the tax department has on record and what your company’s books show. So before altering or deleting anything, it helps to first locate and review the entry properly, which is where the Day Book comes in.

Displaying vouchers: the day book is your control centre 🔗

The Day Book is the single report where every voucher you have entered shows up in one place. It lists all transactions made on a particular day, including financial vouchers, inventory vouchers, and even reversing or memorandum journals, and it can also be widened to cover a full week, month, or financial year.

Opening the day book 🔗

From the Gateway of Tally, the path is straightforward:

By default, the report opens showing only the last date on which a voucher was entered, since the Day Book is designed to display the current date’s transactions unless you tell it otherwise.

Filtering by period and voucher type 🔗

To review a wider range, press F2 to change the period, or Alt+F2 to define a custom date range. If you are hunting for one specific type of voucher, say all sales entries from a particular week, press F4 (Change Vouch) and choose the voucher type from the list. This narrows the report so you are not scrolling through unrelated payment or journal entries. Once you can see the entry you need, place the cursor on it and press Enter to open it for viewing.

How to alter a voucher entry 🔗

Altering a voucher simply means opening a saved entry, changing the details, and saving it again. Tally does not require you to delete and re-create the whole transaction for a small correction.

Step-by-step alteration 🔗

1. Locate the voucher. Open the Day Book (or the relevant ledger, sales register, or purchase register) and find the entry.
2. Select and open it. Move the cursor to the voucher and press Enter. This takes you into the voucher alteration screen, which looks identical to the original entry screen.
3. Make the correction. Edit the ledger name, amount, narration, date, or any other field that needs fixing.
4. Save the changes. Press Ctrl+A, or simply accept the screen, to save the altered voucher.

This same alter-through-the-Day-Book approach applies consistently across voucher types in Tally.ERP 9, including sales and purchase orders, which can be altered or deleted either from the Day Book or from the relevant Inventory Books.

What you can and cannot edit 🔗

Nearly every field on a voucher, ledger allocations, amounts, narrations, bill references, and even the voucher date, can be modified through alteration. However, two things are worth remembering. First, if a voucher number has already been used for printing or for a statutory return, changing its amount can create a mismatch outside Tally that you will need to reconcile manually. Second, once GST or other statutory details are involved, an amount change may also require you to adjust the corresponding tax ledgers, so a small correction can have a ripple effect if you are not careful.

How to delete a voucher entry 🔗

Sometimes a voucher should never have been created at all, for example, a duplicate entry, or a transaction that was cancelled before delivery. In such cases, deletion is more appropriate than alteration.

Deleting through the day book 🔗

1. Open the Day Book and locate the voucher you want to remove.
2. Select the entry so it is highlighted.
3. Press Alt+D. Tally will ask for confirmation before permanently removing the voucher.
4. Confirm the deletion. The voucher, and its effect on every ledger it touched, is removed from the books.

Unlike alteration, deletion is final; there is no dedicated undo command for a deleted voucher once you exit the screen, so it is worth double-checking the entry before confirming.

Delete versus cancel: know the difference 🔗

Tally.ERP 9 gives you two distinct ways to deal with a voucher you no longer want to keep active, and students often confuse them.

Cancelling is useful when you want an audit trail showing that a transaction was recorded and later reversed, rather than making it disappear entirely. This distinction becomes especially important once a company is subject to statutory record-keeping requirements, which is the next thing worth understanding.

The compliance angle: audit trails and edit logs 🔗

Correcting entries is a normal part of bookkeeping, but Indian company law now expects that correction to be traceable. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs amended the Companies (Accounts) Rules, 2014 to require that, every company using accounting software must use software that records an audit trail of each transaction, creates an edit log of every change made to the books along with the date, and ensures that this audit trail cannot be switched off. After a couple of deferrals, this requirement became mandatory for companies (other than sole proprietorships, partnerships, and LLPs) from the financial year beginning 1 April 2023, and experts have noted that it effectively means firms can no longer quietly delete an entry; they can only record a rectification against it.

This is a useful thing for a B.Com student to keep in mind. Tally.ERP 9 itself, being an older product line, does not carry this always-on edit log feature; it was built into Tally Prime and its later releases specifically to meet this rule. In a classroom setting or a personal practice file, altering and deleting vouchers freely is fine for learning. In a live company that falls under the Companies Act, every alteration and deletion is expected to leave a recoverable trail, which changes how carefully these features should be used in practice.

Best practices before you alter or delete a voucher 🔗

• Verify before you touch it. Open the voucher and read the entry fully rather than assuming what needs to change from memory.
• Check downstream effects. If the voucher affects a bank reconciliation, an outstanding bill, or a tax return already filed, note that before you edit it.
• Prefer cancellation over deletion for genuine business documents. If a sales order or invoice was formally issued and then withdrawn, cancelling preserves a record; deleting erases it.
• Keep a backup. In a working environment, it is standard practice to take a data backup before a bulk correction exercise, so nothing important is lost by mistake.
• Reconcile after major changes. After altering several vouchers, re-check the ledger or ratio reports affected to confirm the books still tie out correctly.

What do you think? If your company’s accounting software could never let you delete a voucher, only mark it as corrected, would that make the books more trustworthy, or just harder to work with day to day? And between altering a wrong entry and cancelling it outright, which would you choose if you had already shown that invoice to a customer?

References

1. https://help.tallysolutions.com/article/Tally.ERP9/Voucher_Entry/Accounting_Vouchers/Voucher_Entry_in_Tally.htm
2. https://help.tallysolutions.com/article/Tally.ERP9/Reports/Display_Registers_Ledgers/Display_Day_Book.htm
3. https://help.tallysolutions.com/docs/te9rel55/Voucher_Entry/Order_Processing/Alter_Delete_Sales_Order.htm
4. https://www.mca.gov.in/Ministry/pdf/AccountsAmendmentRules_24032021.pdf
5. https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/cos-must-have-audit-trail-of-transactions-from-next-fy-123031501027_1.html