Lightyear Automated Purchasing & Accounts Payable
Purchase Orders
Create, approve and send PO's to your suppliers for immediate ordering. Match your POs with your deliveries and invoices for 3-way matching. Allow your team members to Create detailed purchase orders for Services and/or Products, from your suppliers' item's catalogue.
Approve Purchase Orders
- Lightyear’s automated approvals workflow will then route the Purchase Orders to the correct Approver, seamlessly without user input.
Send to Supplier
- Lightyear sends your purchase order directly to your suppliers' email address for one-click acceptance.
Supplier Acceptance
- See immediately when a supplier has accepted and instantly see the status of your order.
Goods Received Tracking
- Keep track of your received and outstanding stock via Lightyear's ‘GRN’ feature.
Approval by Value
- Automatically send approval tasks to users based on the amount of the Purchase Order raised.
Ingestion of Purchase Orders
- Upload Purchase Orders from third party systems to be extracted and matched to invoices in Lightyear.
Custom Prefix
- Enter a custom prefix for the Purchase Order Number to be used when POs are created within Lightyear. Multiple Prefixes can be created and used.
Automatic 3-Way Line Item Matching
- Lightyear are currently the only company in the world that allows our customers to automatically 3-way match their purchase order with their GRN and their suppliers Bill in seconds on a line item level.
Intelligent Data Extraction
LExA (Lightyear's Extraction Automation) extracts all the line-item SKU data from your suppliers' invoices, credit notes and statements with 100% accuracy. Extract data from receipts too!
Automatic Bill, Credit Note & Statement Data Extraction
- LExA Lightyear's proprietary data-extraction engine instantly extracts data with 100% accuracy from system-generated PDFs. You can also extract data from True PDFs or Scanned Images of Statements for reconciliation within Lightyear.
Supported File Types
- PDF, PNG, TIF, TIFF, JPG, JPEG
OCR Data Extraction from Image Files
- For image-based documents, Lightyear extracts data using OCR technology in less than 2 minutes.
Mobile App
- Snap a photo of your receipts or bills and upload them. Available for iOS and Android. The mobile app extracts summary data from receipts in less than 2 minutes for you to view.
Manual Entry Option
- Manually enter bills that aren't able to have data extracted from them, such as hand-written bills, dockets or receipts.
Rule Based Coding
- Automate coding at a supplier, bill, line or product level - the choice is yours. Set rules for keywords or product codes to drive coding rules.
Automatic Price Checking
- Compare each lines' product code with your supplier's agreed price list, flagging any that are overcharging to you. Lightyear will even process bills from overseas suppliers, whatever currency they use.
Foreign Currency
- Process bills from overseas suppliers, whatever currency they use.
Validation Checks
- Lightyear cross-checks extracted data against bill total to ensure data accuracy.
Upload Multiple Documents
- Upload multiple bills in the same document and split them into individual bills from within Lightyear.
Unique Email Address
- Choose your own Lightyear email address to share with your suppliers. Get bills emailed directly to Lightyear.
File Upload from Desktop
- Drag and drop your bills into Lightyear from your browser. 10mb limit.
Forward Existing Emails
- Re-direct or forward your existing supplier emails to your business's new Lightyear email address
Budgets - Coming Soon
Easily control spend with Lightyear’s budgets. Set budgets by Departments, Project and Company by time period.
Automated Bookkeeping
Set bookkeeping automation rules for GL coding at a line item level, tracking categories and supplier tax rates. Set rules based on supplier or Invoice specific criteria.
Approvals
Multi-tiered approvals process to approve your supplier invoices for payment and purchase orders. Get up to 5 levels of approval.
Multi Tiered Approvals
- Robust approvals process that can be customised to allow 1,2 or 3 different levels of approval.
Export Before Approval
- Remove the approval process entirely and export from the Approvals tab, no need for any approval on documents.
Departments
- Lightyear Departments restrict users to only view and approve bills that are relevant to them.
Send Bill Approval Tasks
- Send approval tasks to other Lightyear users, or even to external persons via email.
Approval by Value
- Send approvals to up to 2 users based on the value of the invoice, set at a company level or per supplier.
Proxy Approval
- Automatically redirect approval tasks to another user when you're on annual leave.
Route Bill Workflows
- Automatically route bills to managers for secondary approval on a per-bill or per-user basis.
Audit Trail Peace of Mind
- See exactly who did what, and when, on every bill. Leave permanent notes for other users on specific bills.
Dispute Bills
- Move bills to your 'Disputed' tab temporarily as the dispute is resolved.
Customise Your View
- Our unique 3-panel layout gives you all the information you need on 1 screen (or switch to a 2-panel view).
Flag Duplicate Bills
- Automatically alerts you to any duplicate bills that may already be in your approval workflow.
Attach Documents to Bills
- Attach supplementary documents to a bill e.g. delivery dockets, POs, contracts etc.
Notifications
- Receive notifications via email, in browser or in mobile app whenever there is a new approvals request.
Get Copies of Bills
- You can email yourself a copy of the original bill by selecting 'Email to Me', or simply download from the browser.
Notes
- Users can collaborate on a bill via notes function, or simply leave notes for yourself.
Product Type Ahead
- Start typing in the Product Code or Description fields and we'll suggest items on each line, based on your Product List.
Filtering
- Apply a filter based on suppliers, departments and GL codes to find the invoices you're looking for.
Grouped Data
- Group line items based on GL Code for export. Rather than exporting 100 lines to 1 GL code, export the 1 line instead.
Archive
Lightyear's secure Archive keeps your documents safe for up to 7 years with ISO 27001 and AWS secure server.
7 Year Bill Archive
- Store your supplier invoices for up to 7 years depending on your country.
Cloud storage
- All your document data (including document image) is accessible from anywhere.
Dynamic Search Function
- Search by supplier, GL code, amount, category, keywords etc, or a combination of all.
Reports
- Download any search result to csv to allow for further data analysis.
Tax Office Compliance
- Lightyear is tax-office compliant, giving your and your auditors' peace of mind.
Supplier Management
Lightyear helps you manage your suppliers, from bulk uploads to automatic statement reconciliation.
Bulk Supplier Upload
- Import all suppliers through one CSV. Upload as much or as little information as you need.
Default Coding
- Apply a GL code, Category, Tax Code, Approver or Department to an invoice based on the supplier.
Bank Detail Checker BETA
- Flags fraud detection by checking the extracted bank details on an invoice against your own records.
Keyword Rules
- Set a GL Code, Category and Default Approver on an invoice if a specified word appears on the invoice
Mobile App
Snap a photo of your receipts or bills and upload them. Available for iOS and Android.
Document Capture
- Snap photos of your receipts (or bills) and upload them to your Lightyear account.
Approvals
- Approve, dispute or reject bills while you are on the go.
Collaboration
- View and reply to any notes or mentions straight from the mobile app.
Auto Reconcile Statements
Touchless Supplier statement reconciliation. Lightyear will Automatically reconcile your supplier statements and flag variances for review.
Checks for Missing Bills
- Lightyear matches the content of the supplier statement with the documents in your Lightyear account.
One Click to Request Copy
- Missing documents are flagged and with one-click Lightyear emails the supplier, asking for a copy.
Communications
Working remotly has now become easier than ever before. Lightyear allows for instant communication between your finance team.
View Sent/Received Tasks
- View any Tasks your team have received or that you have sent to your colleagues.
@mention Users
- @mention any other users to notify them of any questions, comments or things you would like them to do.
Notifications Feed
- Each user has a dedicated Notifications Feed for any mentions or approval requests.
Roles and Permissions
Within Lightyear there are multiple levels of permissions that can be designated against a user, This can be particularly useful for franchises or multi-entity businesses.
Admin/User/Reports Only
- Give users different levels of access depending on what they need to do in Lightyear.
Approval Permissions
- Set user specific permissions to customise what they can do in the Bill Approval Workflow.
Purchase Order Permissions
- Set user specific permissions to customise what they can do in the Purchase Order Workflow.
Miscellaneous Permissions
- Extra roles which can be added to Approval Permissions to give users additional abilities within Lightyear.
Security Measures
- Enable Multifactor Authentication to add an extra layer of security an entire account, or set per user.
Personalise Your Profile
- Upload a photo to your avatar so people will instantly recognise you in app.
Inventory Management
Lightyear allows you to export stock data to any third party inventory system that accepts a CSV upload allowing you to keep on top of your stock.
Splitting Widget - Coming Soon
Manually split a single invoice line into multiple, based on a percentage or amount.
Lets Get Going Program
We offer a white-glove Let's Get Going service to assist you getting started with Lightyear.