Lightyear: Not Buzz

No not THE Buzz Lightyear but hopefully enough in this article to create some Buzz around your accounts payable function. 

For small businesses, accounts payable often justs means a whole pile of data entry. Most small businesses will enter more “bills” than invoices so how can this business function get smoothed out? 

The major accounting platforms offer some automation while allowing you to attach a copy of the invoice as a pdf. MYOB had their In Tray, Xero gives you an email address to bring the invoice in and QBO has its Business network. To add to those basic functions most bookkeepers live or die by HubDoc or Dext.

Dext was once Receipt Bank and they had the best t-shirts one Xerocon ... never replicated by the way...

I don't live or die by one software brand and HubDoc does a decent enough job bearing in mind it is free to Xero users, and for that reason alone it is my usual starting point for clients beginning their paperless journey. So when I was introduced to LightYear, it did not cause too much “buzz” for me. 

UNTIL I saw a live demo … especially for those clients who have a hefty accounts payable function. 

Apart from data entry savings, Lightyear adds multi level approvals (so a Line Manager and General Manager can approve the bill BEFORE it goes into the accounting software.

Not approved = not synced = not paid

It also will apply that multi level set up to Purchase Orders - if needed by the business - with the supplier receiving and accepting your purchase order electronically. Once the bill comes back the line extraction allows you to have items with individual costs and GST codes without any data entry required. And it will also do that on bills in a foreign currency. 

The feature that really sold me - however makes me feel like a true bean counter - is the supplier statement reconciliation.

The supplier statement comes into to Lightyear, matching all lines on the supplier statement to bills and credits AND auto populates and emails your suppliers about any missing documents. It then archives the reconciled statements for a year. Bookkeeping best practice right there! Data entry, invoice approvals and accounts payable reconciliation all in one platform.

So if you are heading down the track of feeling you need the extra functionality outside of any freebies your accounting software provides, Lightyear definitely needs to be on your list. 

If you only reconcile your bank accounts we definitely need to chat about starting a process, otherwise you might be paying for things you don’t need to.