Product Updates: Q1 2021

Published date: 15th April 2021

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Grab a coffee and dive in....

We are thrilled to bring you a host of frequently requested features and share news of our recent recognition by Gartner, Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice as the Category Leaders in Accounts Payable, globally.

In addition to this blog, we will be running live webinars where you can ask questions on our latest features, as well as a dedicated PO demo webinar that will take you through our new workflow. Click Below to join our Q1 feature release webinar on Wednesday 28th of April 2021 at 11am and/or register your interest in our PO webinar.

Q1 Feature Webinar

PO Feature Webinar

Q1 Feature Releases & Updates

Use Lightyear to automate your purchasing process - YouTube link

Back in December, we revealed Lightyear’s Purchase Orders BETA to much acclaim. More details on the launch can be found here. Based on the great feedback we have received, we have continued to further enhance our PO functionality with the following features:

PO Approvals - POs can now be routed to Approvers for one-click approval via the Mobile App, Email or desktop UI. Approvals can be automated by Supplier and by PO value.
Product Type Ahead - Lightyear can now pre-populate all your product purchase data for you (such as Product Codes, Descriptions, Unit Prices and GL codes) during Purchase Order creation, a massive time saver.
Edit & Void POs after ordering - You can now assign user permissions to allow certain users to edit and/or void POs after they have been ordered
Add Terms and Conditions - Given that POs are a legally binding document, it's pretty important to have your T&C's attached. You can now upload a supplementary page (or pages) of T&C's in your Purchase Order settings. These will be attached to the Lightyear-created PO, ensuring your suppliers are clear on the Terms and Conditions they are accepting.

Assign Rules by Description - YouTube link

In addition to assigning rules based on Product Codes extracted, you can now assign line by line automation rules such as GL code and categories based off of keywords in the extracted description field.

This feature will now allow you to fully automate line by line bookkeeping rules for service documents. Click here to learn more.

Approvals by Bill Value - YouTube link

Lightyear is now able to automatically route bills for approval to managers based on the value of the bill. You can set up to 2 conditional approval triggers. For example, send to Manager A if over $2500 and/or send to Manager 2 if over $5000. What's even better than that?... We have also built a live FX Integration which will even enable this feature on bills of different currencies using the exchange rate on the date of the bill.

Data extraction enhancements - YouTube link

Lightyear can now extract data from invoices with line data split across more than one row.

If you have a supplier that sends lines that contain both taxed and non-taxed components, Lightyear can now automatically split the lines into a taxed and non taxed row.

Manually enter amounts including or excluding tax

On rare occasions when users may need to manually enter bills, you can now opt to enter line values excluding tax, including tax or without tax in any of the Lightyear workflow tabs. This is a really convenient feature for suppliers who only display line item values including tax, as this would have previously required some manual calculation. You can find this toggle under the document totals area in panel 2.

Archive Reporting enhancements - YouTube link

Columns displaying the approvers of documents are now presented in the Archive view allowing a simple overview of all approval steps completed.

We have also enhanced our file export function to include a unique Invoice URL to provide quick one-click access to your documents from the CSV export.

Send supplier communications from an external email - YouTube link

Our customers have loved having the ability to email suppliers directly from Lightyear since we launched that feature last year. You can now authorise your own external email address to send communications from within Lightyear. For example, ap@companyabc.com can now be set as the sender email for all PO, Bill, Credit note and supplier statement queries. This is great for suppliers which may require that you send POs from a specific domain for security reasons.

Export data pre-approval - YouTube link

Although not a regularly used workflow, due to some customer requests we have now introduced the optional ability to export from the Approvals tab. This allows our customers to export their data to their accountancy software before it passes through the Approvals flow, which can help to give you a more up-to-date overview of your finances if your Approvals process takes time.

Partner Updates

QBO Billable customers and Projects - YouTube link

We've heard a lot Quickbooks Online customers articulate that they need to sync billable lines and assign customers. You can now activate Billable and Customer syncing within Lightyear Quickbooks Online Settings area. This will allow you to select lines as billable and choose customers to sync the billable lines through to QBO.

New Partnerships & Integrations - YouTube link

We are excited to announce the following partnership and export defaults:

AccountsIQ

We have acquired new partners in AccountsIQ. They are an industry-leading mid-market accounting solution, focused on improving productivity, streamlining processes and giving businesses better insights than ever before.

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Our latest integration updates now allow you to sync data into Microsoft Dynamics365. More information here

What's Next? - YouTube link

Automatic Line by line by line Bill to PO matching

We have heard that matching Bills to Goods Received Records and Purchase Orders is an incredibly time consuming task. The Lightyear team have been hard and work building automated Line by Line Bill to PO Matching. This feature will be a game changer for any businesses who are using Purchase orders to order stock and need to reconcile supplier Bills against the Purchase Order. Match PO lines to multiple Bill lines.

Import Purchase Orders from Third party systems

We know that many of Lightyear's customers use third party Accounting, ERP and POS solutions to order their stock.

Group export data by General Ledger code and tracking categories

Lightyear saves hours upon hours of data entry with our line by line data extraction, giving rich data to take advantage of line by line coding, price checking and inventory export. However, sometimes we hear that you don't want all that line data into your Accounting & ERP systems. It may be that your legacy system starts to slow with too much data. We will be releasing a feature to group your line data by GL and Categories, if applicable. This will allow you to take advantage of our world class line item extraction whilst only sending summary data to your Accounting and ERP system.

Remember you can keep track of all our feature releases here

Lightyear awarded Category Leader by Gartner

We were honoured to be accepted to the TechNation fast50 last year, recognising us as one of the UK's fastest growing Fintech's. We're even more delighted to follow this up with the Accounts Payable Category Leaders award by Gartner, GetApp and Software Advice as well as being shortlisted by Capterra within the same segment. Read all about our awards from Gartner here.

Q1 Feature Webinar

PO Feature Webinar

About the Author

Chris is the founder and CEO of Lightyear.