Customizing Voucher Types in Tally ERP.9

Open any company file in Tally ERP.9 and you already have a full set of vouchers waiting for you: Payment, Receipt, Contra, Sales, Purchase, Journal, and a few others. For most small transactions, these work fine. But the moment a business wants to track something differently, say, keep petty cash payments separate from regular bank payments, the standard list starts to feel restrictive. That’s exactly the gap that custom voucher types are built to fill, and learning to create, alter, and delete them is a small skill that makes a real difference to how clean your books look.

Why the default voucher list often falls short 🔗

Tally ERP.9 ships with 18 pre-defined voucher types covering both accounting and inventory transactions, and each one is designed to perform a specific job, such as recording a sale or a bank payment. But businesses rarely fit into one template. A retail outlet might want two separate sales vouchers, one for cash counter sales and another for credit sales to registered dealers, so that reports for each can be pulled up independently, a use case the official Tally documentation specifically points to as a reason for creating new voucher types.

Petty cash is the classic example used in most accounting courses. When a company pays large supplier bills and also hands out small amounts of cash for stationery, courier charges, or tea and snacks, lumping both under a single Payment voucher makes the cash book messy and harder to audit. A dedicated Petty Cash Payment voucher type, built on top of the existing Payment voucher, solves this instantly. It’s also worth remembering that under Section 40A(3) of the Income Tax Act, cash expenses above a certain limit per day per transaction can be disallowed, so keeping petty cash entries visibly separate helps a business self-check its compliance at a glance rather than digging through a mixed ledger later.

Where to find the voucher type creation screen 🔗

The path is the same whether you are working with accounting or inventory vouchers: Gateway of Tally > Accounts Info. (or Inventory Info.) > Voucher Type > Create. This single screen is where every custom voucher type in your company is born, whether it’s a specialised sales voucher, a bank payment voucher, or a petty cash voucher.

Filling in the general details 🔗

The Voucher Type Creation screen is split into three logical sections: General, Printing, and Voucher Class, according to Tally’s own help documentation. Here’s what each field in the General section actually controls.

Name, alias, and the base voucher type 🔗

Start with a Name for the new voucher, something descriptive like “Petty Cash Payment” or “Cash Sales Invoice.” You can also give it an alias if you want a shorter internal reference. Next comes the most important choice: the Type of Voucher. This must be one of the existing predefined types, and your new voucher inherits all its underlying behaviour. A petty cash voucher, for instance, would be based on the Payment voucher type so that it continues to debit expense ledgers and credit the cash account exactly the way a normal payment voucher does.

Choosing an abbreviation 🔗

The Abbr field lets you set a short form that appears in unformatted reports. If you skip it, Tally assigns a default automatically. There’s no hard limit on length, but keeping it to five characters or fewer is the general recommendation so it displays neatly across reports.

Deciding how the voucher will be numbered 🔗

This is often the real reason someone creates a separate voucher type in the first place, since it lets a business run an independent numbering series for a category of transactions. Tally ERP.9 offers four methods:

If you pick Automatic, Tally also offers an Advance Configuration option, which opens a secondary screen for finer control over the numbering behaviour, useful for businesses running multiple branches or financial years within one company file.

A few more settings worth knowing 🔗

Beyond numbering, the General section also lets you decide whether the voucher should carry an effective date separate from its entry date (handy for overdue or ageing analysis), whether it should default to an Optional Voucher that doesn’t affect the ledgers until confirmed, and how narrations should behave, either one common narration for the whole voucher or a separate narration for each individual entry line.

Printing and voucher class options 🔗

The Printing section decides whether the voucher prints automatically the moment it’s saved, which suits businesses that hand a printed slip to the customer or vendor on the spot. If your new voucher type is based on Sales, you’ll also see options like Use for POS Invoicing and a Default Print Title, both aimed at retail counter setups.

The Voucher Class section is where things get genuinely powerful for repetitive entries. Creating a class under a voucher type lets you pre-fill certain ledger allocations, so routine transactions like a fixed monthly rent payment need far less manual entry each time. For Stock Journal voucher types specifically, this section also enables a Manufacturing Journal option for production-related entries.

Walking through a petty cash voucher example 🔗

Suppose a small trading firm wants to stop recording petty expenses through the same Payment voucher it uses for supplier settlements. Here’s how the creation would typically go:

1. Open the creation screen: Gateway of Tally > Accounts Info. > Voucher Type > Create.
2. Name it: Type “Petty Cash Payment” in the Name field.
3. Base it on Payment: Select Payment as the Type of Voucher so it inherits standard debit-credit behaviour.
4. Set an abbreviation: Something like “PCash” so it’s recognisable in reports.
5. Choose numbering: Automatic works well here, so every petty cash voucher gets its own running series, separate from regular payment vouchers.
6. Save: Accept the screen, and the new voucher type immediately appears in the voucher menu, ready to be used from the accounting voucher entry screen.

From here on, every time cash is drawn for office supplies, courier charges, or local conveyance, it gets recorded under this dedicated voucher, keeping the petty cash trail distinct and easy to reconcile, a practice consistent with how petty cash control systems are typically recommended for Indian businesses.

Viewing, altering, and deleting a custom voucher type 🔗

Once a voucher type exists, managing it is straightforward. Go to Gateway of Tally > Accounts Info. (or Inventory Info.) > Voucher Type, and you’ll find Display and Alter options alongside Create. Selecting either brings up a list of your existing voucher types to choose from. Apart from the heading at the top, the Display and Alter screens look identical to the Creation screen, so editing a numbering method or narration setting later is just as easy as setting it up the first time.

Deleting a voucher type follows a similar path. Open it through Alter, and once the voucher type is on screen, pressing Alt+D deletes it after a confirmation prompt, the same standard shortcut Tally uses for deleting most masters, as outlined in Tally-focused training resources. One caveat worth remembering here: a voucher type can only be deleted if no transactions have already been recorded against it. If vouchers exist under that type, you’ll need to either move or delete those entries first, or simply retire the voucher type going forward instead of removing it outright.

Why this small feature matters for accounting practice 🔗

Custom voucher types might look like a minor configuration detail, but they sit at the heart of good bookkeeping discipline. Separating petty cash from regular payments, splitting cash sales from credit sales, or creating a distinct voucher for inter-branch transfers all make ledgers easier to audit, easier to reconcile, and easier to explain to an auditor or examiner. For B.Com students, this topic also reinforces a broader accounting principle taught across the curriculum: that the structure you choose for recording a transaction should reflect how that transaction is actually used and reported, not just how it’s paid. It’s worth noting that Tally Solutions has since moved its flagship product to TallyPrime, but the underlying logic of voucher type creation, numbering methods, and classes carries over almost unchanged, which is exactly why mastering it in Tally ERP.9 remains useful groundwork.

What do you think? If you were setting up the books for a small retail business, which transactions would you want tracked through their own dedicated voucher type, and why would keeping them separate actually help at the time of an audit?

References

1. https://help.tallysolutions.com/docs/te9rel54/Creating_Masters/Inventory_Info/Inventory_Voucher_Type.htm
2. https://tallysolutions.com/accounting/petty-cash-management/
3. https://help.tallysolutions.com/docs/te9rel49/02_CREATING_MASTERS_IN_TALLY/01_Accounts_Information/Voucher_Types/Creating_a_Voucher_Type.htm
4. https://tallysolutions.com/accounting/petty-cash-example-with-recording-and-control-method/
5. https://tallyschool.com/delete-a-voucher-type-in-tally/
6. https://www.techjockey.com/blog/tally-erp-9-vs-tally-prime