What Are The Limitations of Primitive Routing
Day after day, if your team is buried under a mountain of invoices, each one waiting for someone to manually read, check, and route it, fatigue sets in.
Additionally, the increasing volume of printed invoices risks them getting lost even before they reach the right desk. Many automation systems try to help, but they only apply a basic threshold: If invoice > X, send for approval to person Y.
But spending alone doesn’t determine who the right approver should be. For example, a £5000 invoice might be routed to senior management based on value. However, the supplier reference includes “Legal fees”, and therefore, it should be routed to the Legal department. But if your automation platform cannot route based on the department, the invoice will not reach the right approver, bouncing back and forth while your legal team waits.
The result? What should have been a quick approval becomes a slow, frustrating detour, further delaying the approval process.
What Is Contextual Intelligence?
In finance and AP workflows, contextual intelligence means the system doesn’t just look at a single data point (like the amount in the invoice), but also interprets the context around the data.
In terms of AP automation, features like Keyword Approvals use contextual intelligence to overcome the limitation of primitive value-threshold routing. When your automation system enables Keyword Approvals, you can auto-route invoices for approvals based on pre-defined keyword rules.
For example, an invoice referencing “Marketing” in the description can go straight to the Marketing Manager. Similarly, when the system spots an invoice with a “Sydney postcode”, it understands geography. Within seconds, that invoice will be routed to your Sydney branch manager.
This is what contextual intelligence looks like in action, where it’s behaving like an experienced team member.
How Does Lightyear’s Keyword Approval Process Help?
Lightyear’s Keyword Approvals add flexibility by letting you define routing rules based on words or phrases on the invoice. This gives you benefits such as:
Time-Savings
No more spending hours manually scanning your invoices to route them to the correct person. Invoices are routed instantly, keeping workflows moving without bottlenecks. Cambridge United is proof of this in action. Since implementing Lightyear, their approvals have become 7x faster, showing the real impact of intelligent, context-driven workflows.
Compliance and Audit Readiness
Every keyword-triggered approval is logged, creating a clear trail of who reviewed it. This ensures that your team is prepared for audits and can demonstrate consistent, policy-driven processes. Here’s what Evergreen Care said after using Lightyear: ‘'Rather than going to the attic to find 500 pieces of paper, we gave the auditors Lightyear access and left them to it. Now that invoice processing is handled by Lightyear, the team can work on crucial things.''
Scalability
As your invoice volumes grow, keyword rules structure approvals without additional manual effort. Your workflows scale seamlessly, no matter how quickly your business grows.
Synergistic Effect
Lightyear combines value-based thresholds with keyword-driven rules, ensuring invoices are routed to the right person the first time, reducing confusion and keeping workflows moving. This flexibility also supports multi-stage approvals where needed. For example, a marketing invoice over £500 needs to move through multiple approvers: first, the marketing manager and then the marketing director. By working in tandem, contextual rules and value-based thresholds create approval workflows that are reliable and scalable, adapting to the complexity of your business as it grows.
Stronger Supplier Relationships
With approval bottlenecks removed, you can pay your suppliers on time. Faster turnaround will help you build trust, strengthen vendor partnerships, and reduce the risk of disputes over delayed payments.
What if your AP automation system could think like a team member? With Lightyear’s Keyword Approvals, that’s exactly what you get.
It auto-routes invoices to the right approver based on keywords. No more bottlenecks caused by manual checks. Instead, your approvals process becomes smarter, faster, and more reliable, ensuring compliance, reducing risk, and keeping suppliers happy.
