If you keep your books in Tally Prime and you reconcile against a bank account, you have probably spent more evenings than you would like manually typing out Receipt and Payment vouchers from a bank statement. Tally does support Excel-based voucher import — the feature has been there since Tally Prime 2.0 — but the template format is strict enough that most people give up after the first import error and go back to manual entry. This guide walks through the workflow we built into the converter to bypass that friction completely.
What Tally Prime actually wants
The Tally Prime Excel import expects a workbook with at least one sheet per voucher type (Receipt, Payment, Sales, Purchase, Journal, Contra), with specific column names and ordering. For bank reconciliation, the two voucher types you care about are:
- Receipt — for inward credits (salary, customer payments, NEFT credits, interest income)
- Payment — for outward debits (vendor payments, fees, EMIs, UPI sends)
Each voucher needs four mandatory fields beyond date and amount: a unique voucher number, the bank ledger name (which must match the Tally ledger exactly, character for character), the contra ledger (where the other leg of the entry posts), and the narration.
Where most workflows break down
The three places we see people get stuck:
- Voucher numbers must be unique and monotonic. If you have already entered vouchers up to Rcpt240 for the period, your import has to start at Rcpt241, not 1. If you import duplicates, Tally rejects the entire file with a generic error.
- Ledger names must already exist in Tally. If you import a Payment voucher with contra ledger “Suspense” and your Tally company has it as “Suspense A/c”, the import silently posts to a new ledger with the wrong name — and you spend an hour the next month figuring out where the money went.
- Dates must be in a format Tally recognises. Tally Prime accepts either DD-MMM-YYYY (01-Apr-2026) or YYYY-MM-DD (2026-04-01) when reading from Excel. Our Tally export uses YYYY-MM-DD with an explicit Excel date cell type, which Tally Prime 4.0 and 5.0 both import cleanly. What does not work is DD/MM/YYYY text cells — if you re-save the workbook in a tool that converts the date cells to text in the wrong format, the import will fail.
The end-to-end workflow
Step 1: Make sure your Tally ledgers exist first
Open Tally Prime, go to Gateway of Tally → Chart of Accounts → Ledgers, and confirm the bank ledger you will be importing into exists (typically “HDFC Bank” or “ICICI Current Account”). Also confirm your default contra ledgers exist — most accountants use one ledger for receipts that have not been classified yet (commonly “B2c Debtors” or “Sundry Debtors”) and one for payments (commonly “Suspense” or “Sundry Creditors”). You will reclassify these later through Tally’s voucher edit screen as you identify each transaction.
Step 2: Note your next voucher number
From Gateway of Tally → Display More Reports → Day Book, filter on Receipt vouchers for the current period and note the highest voucher number used. Do the same for Payment vouchers. Your import file needs to start one above each of these.
Step 3: Upload your PDF with the Tally template enabled
On the home page, drop your bank statement PDF onto the upload zone, then tick the Also include Tally template checkbox before clicking Upload. You will need to be signed in (free Google login) because the Tally export takes meaningfully more processing.
The checkbox reveals four input fields:
- Bank a/c ledger — the exact ledger name as it appears in your Tally company (e.g. HDFC Bank)
- Receipts ledger — the default contra for credits (e.g. B2c Debtors)
- Payments ledger — the default contra for debits (e.g. Suspense)
- Receipt Voucher No. (start) and Payment Voucher No. (start) — the next number for each type
Voucher numbers accept a text prefix (e.g. Rcpt241 will produce Rcpt241, Rcpt242, Rcpt243, ...), which is handy if your firm uses prefixed voucher schemes.
Step 4: Import into Tally
The download is a 3-sheet workbook: Receipt, Payment, and Transactions (the last sheet is the plain conversion output so you have a reference copy of the original transactions if you ever need to re-import). In Tally Prime, go to Gateway of Tally → Import → Vouchers, browse to the file you downloaded, and pick Excel as the source format. Tally will read both the Receipt and Payment sheets and post the vouchers under the bank ledger you specified.
Step 5: Reclassify in Tally
All the vouchers will initially be posted against the default contra ledger you picked. Use Tally’s Day Book → Alter flow to walk through each voucher and reassign the contra ledger to the correct one (e.g. specific vendor accounts, expense heads, customer accounts). This is the only part of the workflow that still requires judgement — everything before this is mechanical.
What about GST?
The Tally template does not auto-fill GST fields, because the GST rate depends on the underlying transaction (which the bank statement does not tell us). If your books require GST entries on bank transactions, you will need to add the GST details during the reclassification step in Tally.