Product Updates: Instant Messaging and Notifications

Published date: 24th June 2020

Over the past 3 months, we've heard more than ever how critical Lightyear has been to enable you to continue business operations whilst working remotely.

Today, we are announcing the release of one of our most requested features - Instant messaging-style collaboration and your own personal notifications feed.

Grab a coffee and watch our Head of Customer Success, Candice Lim, explain it all in the release video above, or read further on ...

Instant Messaging (kind of ... )

Lightyear has always connected finance teams, internal approvers, bookkeepers, accountants and suppliers, all within one cloud platform accessible from a desktop, tablet or mobile app.

Now we’re taking collaboration to a WHOLE NEW LEVEL with our instant messaging feature. You can now @tag other Lightyear users in the notes section and have a collaborative conversation relating to a document with as many people as you wish. The tagged users will receive a mention in their Notifications Bar and via the mobile app, enabling live collaboration on a document level. Mmmm, a Notification Bar you say? Read on.....

Introducing your Notifications Feed

We have introduced a user-specific notifications feed to immediately flag to you when your attention is required. You will be notified when another user @tags you, or when a document is assigned to you for approval via the 'Send Bill Task' function, a function that you can now automate. (More on that later).

From the Notifications Feed you can perform quick actions such as view, reply or approve a bill, respond to notes, and tag other users.

Get more information on how the instant messaging and notification centre works on our knowledge base.

And there's more....

Auto-assign bills to Approvers based on keywords within a document!

Last year, we released a feature that allowed you to assign rules in regard to GL-Coding and Tracking Categories based on a keyword on a bill. We have now extended this functionality to automatically route bills to a specific approver based, based on the keyword.

There is more approval automation scheduled for release in the coming months. Our goal is to allow you to route each bill to the right sequence of approvers, automatically.

Email Notifications

You can now elect to have Lightyear users also receive email notifications when an approval request has been sent to them. And from within the email, they can even approve the bill without needing to log into Lightyear or open the mobile app.

Great for occasional approvers, who do not need to regularly access Lightyear. This can be activated from 'My Profile'.

Automatic Gross-Up of Supplier Tax

Many businesses are charged GST/VAT by their suppliers, but some are not able to recover all of the tax back through their returns. Lightyear can now automatically apply a different recoverable tax rate for each supplier, and gross-up the expenses accordingly. More information can be found here.

Supplier Tab Layout Changes

We’ve made massive changes to the Suppliers page in Lightyear.

Previously we displayed a list of Suppliers without any contextual information about that supplier. Whereas now, we are including additional information, such as default nominal code, default tax code, department and the number of days credit.

You can also access additional settings related to each supplier from this screen too. You will be able to access the list of products that each supplier sends you, along with supplier and data-extraction rules.

Previously all the information relating to your suppliers was in varying different location inside your Lightyear account and now we’ve brought them all under 1 tab to make them easier to find.

Extracting even more details from line-items

Lightyear's line-item data-extraction capability is unmatched. To further enhance this, we have added more fields that can be extracted from line-items. These can be used for any detail, such as PO numbers, bill of loading numbers, serial numbers - anything you like!

And much more to come later in 2020

The ability to assign bookkeeping rules, based on keywords and descriptions
Dynamic notifications to the mobile app
Enhancements bringing greater flexibility to the Approvals workflow, allowing bills to be routed by value, default GL-Codes, keywords etc
Optional Multi-Factor Authentication
Purchase Orders (Phase One - Beta) *Please contact support if you would like to be part of the beta-trial