TallyKhata

About TallyKhata

TallyKhata is a digital bookkeeping and payments platform built for Bangladesh's small shopkeepers, now used by more than 5.5 million registered businesses to record transactions and manage payments. Dr. Shahadat Khan founded Progoti Systems Limited, the company behind TallyKhata, after more than two decades of experience across university teaching, research, software engineering, and technology consulting.

TallyKhata itself launched in late 2019, but it was built on top of financial infrastructure Dr. Shahadat Khan's company had already spent years developing.

Two Decades Before Founding a Company

Dr. Shahadat Khan built more than 23 years of experience across university teaching, research and development, software engineering, product marketing, and technology consulting before founding Progoti Systems. He holds a Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Victoria in Canada, earned as a Canadian Commonwealth Scholar.

Before returning to build a company in Bangladesh, he served as CTO at Eyeball Networks in Canada, work that gave him deep technical grounding in networked communications systems.

That grounding in networked systems architecture, built years before mobile financial services became a major Bangladeshi growth category, gave Dr. Shahadat Khan a head start most fintech founders entering the space later did not have, since interoperability between banks, telecom operators, and merchants was the harder infrastructure problem SureCash was built to solve first.

Building Mobile Financial Infrastructure First

Rather than starting with TallyKhata, Dr. Shahadat Khan's Progoti Systems first built SureCash, a mobile financial services network that connected multiple banks, mobile operators, NGOs, merchants, and government payment partners onto a single infrastructure layer. That groundwork in interoperable mobile banking rails came years before TallyKhata existed as a product.

That earlier infrastructure work meant Dr. Shahadat Khan wasn't starting from zero when he later built a consumer-facing product on top of it, a sequencing that set Progoti Systems apart from fintech companies that launched a consumer app before building out the underlying payment rails.

Launching TallyKhata

Progoti Systems launched TallyKhata in late 2019, just before the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated demand for digital tools among small shopkeepers who could no longer rely purely on paper ledgers and in-person transactions. The platform combined a digital bookkeeping ledger with TallyPay, a digital wallet, letting merchants track sales and accept payments in one place.

The timing proved significant. TallyKhata grew into one of the fastest-growing MSME platforms in the country, reaching more than 5.5 million registered businesses and processing over a million transactions daily.

Building Toward Digital Credit

Under Dr. Shahadat Khan's leadership, TallyKhata has continued evolving beyond bookkeeping and payments into working-capital lending for the small merchants using the platform. That shift reflects a broader strategy of using transaction data collected through TallyPay to underwrite credit for businesses that traditional banks have historically found difficult to serve.

That data-driven approach to lending gives TallyKhata a path to revenue beyond transaction fees alone, building directly on the bookkeeping habits the platform has already established among its millions of small-business users, a foundation most standalone lending products in Bangladesh's SME finance market don't have access to.

Where TallyKhata Stands Today

Progoti Systems has also secured Payment Service Provider licensing from Bangladesh Bank, and TallyPay achieved PCI-DSS certification, milestones that position the platform to keep expanding its role in Bangladesh's small business financial infrastructure. Employee reviews reflect that momentum, with consistently positive ratings across both the TallyKhata product team and the wider Progoti Systems organization.

Dr. Shahadat Khan's path from two decades of research and engineering work into building one of Bangladesh's most widely used MSME platforms reflects a founder profile less common among the country's younger fintech startups, one built on infrastructure experience rather than a single consumer-facing idea.

Products

Progoti Systems' business centers on TallyKhata, its flagship digital bookkeeping and payments platform.

TallyKhata is the company's core digital bookkeeping ledger, letting small shopkeepers record sales and track transactions in place of paper-based methods.

TallyPay is the integrated digital wallet within TallyKhata, letting merchants accept and manage payments directly through the same platform.

SureCash is Progoti Systems' earlier mobile financial infrastructure network, connecting banks, mobile operators, NGOs, and merchants onto a single interoperable payment layer, the foundation TallyKhata was later built on top of.

Across bookkeeping, integrated payments, and the underlying SureCash infrastructure, TallyKhata's platform reflects the infrastructure-first strategy that has defined Progoti Systems since Dr. Shahadat Khan's founding, now serving more than 5.5 million small businesses across Bangladesh.