Purchasing & Accounts Payable automation for construction
Tackle the ever-increasing cost of materials and labour with Lightyear’s cloud-based AP automation software for construction.
Simplify your invoice management process, automate approval workflows, create purchase orders on the go, and pay your contractors on time, every time.
An industry recognised app
Key features for Construction businesses
Get control of spending with AP Automation
Whether you’re a Project Manager or Contractor, allow your team members to easily raise Purchase Orders. This will keep your projects on track and automatically route them to the appropriate approver.
Gain tighter control over what your team purchases with automated routing based on values, all while keeping every move documented in Lightyear.
See all featuresOn-the-go approvals
The Lightyear mobile app lets your team approve invoices and Purchase Orders on the go, speeding up the approval process while you're on-site.
Approvers will also be notified on the app when a task/query is raised, or a document is awaiting their approval.
Stay in control of your tax obligations
Lightyear automatically applies VAT/GST to your supplier invoices, ensuring accuracy and compliance.
Automated data at a line item level
Supplier invoices can be sent directly into Lightyear via email. Lightyear's advanced AI extraction tool pulls line item detail from the invoice ready for coding and approval.
Automate your coding to enable fast and accurate reporting at a product level. Identify popular produce for reordering and split costs across multiple venues.
Stop overpaying for the same products
Lightyear automatically flags discrepancies in pricing between your supplier invoice and the agreed supplier pricing, alerting you before payment. This helps you prevent overcharges, maintain cost control, and ensure supplier compliance.
Don't pay twice
The high influx of supplier invoices for construction projects makes duplicate invoices difficult to identify. Lightyear automatically detects duplicate invoices and flags them in the approval tab so you don't spend twice for the same products and services.
Customisable approval workflows
Customise approval workflows that match your construction project hierarchies. Multi-tiered approval workflows in Lightyear allow you to allocate invoices to specific projects, job sites, cost codes, and work orders automatically, ensuring accurate job costing and budgeting.
Better inventory monitoring
You can automatically cross-check invoices, purchase orders, and goods received notes to confirm that you only pay for goods that arrive at the job.
Accurate reporting for decision-making
The price of construction goods and services inevitably increases. However, you can keep track of these cost rises and make smarter business decisions to help reduce project costs. With Lightyear, you can gain real-time insights & generate detailed reports across materials, subcontractors, project sites, or other cost centres.
With 7 years of historical data, Lightyear helps you analyse spending patterns, track supplier pricing trends, and optimise purchasing. This helps you improve budget accuracy across all phases of construction project management, negotiate better rates with suppliers, and keep your project costs in check.
With Lightyear, you just need to get the document in, and it picks up everything for you rather than manually entering every single line. We’d probably need someone part-time by now to help me if we hadn’t started using Lightyear.
With Lightyear, we know exactly where every invoice is at any time and who still needs to sign it off. We can click the link in Xero and look at the invoice instead of going through 100 files to actually find the invoice.
Benefits of AP automation for Construction businesses
Cut costs, not corners. Automate your accounts payable processes and keep projects on budget with Lightyear's AP automation solution.
Stronger Supplier Relationships
Reduce disputes, pay timely and improve trust with your suppliers and subcontractors through faster approvals.
Improved Cash Flow Management
Get real-time visibility into your outstanding invoices and expenses, which helps you better forecast payments and avoid unexpected cash shortages.
Audit Readiness
Keep a digital record of all your supplier & subcontractor invoices and approvals for regulatory requirements and easy auditing.
Budget Control
Create custom approval workflows for invoices and POs that match construction project hierarchies to prevent unnecessary spending.
Integrate with leading solutions
From accounting packages to inventory solutions, Lightyear offers seamless integration into leading systems in the construction industry. Eliminate duplicated work for your team and give them back time they need to complete more pressing tasks.
Trusted by 7,500+ businesses globally
Servicing hospitality businesses is what we do best. We have over a decade of experience working with businesses just like yours. We've helped finance teams reduce their invoice processing by up to 90% and save thousands annually.
Talk to the team about how we can integrate into your business.
Additional resources
Trusted by Leading Accountants and Businesses
Lightyear delivers, and then some. I have found the accuracy of the data extraction and multi-level approval rules have significantly reduced manual processing costs.
The Lightyear team are fantastic to deal with - knowledgeable and patient. They are more than a supplier. They are an invaluable and trusted business partner, who have the best interest of our businesses to heart.
With more than one million Bills processed, Lightyear continues to be an invaluable addition to Abcom’s suite of business applications.
We reviewed a number of AP apps, and Lightyear was by far and away the best. Their sign-off functionality for managers is unique to all the apps we surveyed. Love it!
Lightyear has an easy to use interface, eliminating data-entry and facilitating better business processes around the accounts payable function.
The software itself is very user friendly, making our processes much more efficient and eliminating our need for paper in the accounts payable process.
I love that all my actions can be done in one place - Lightyear stores/archives all information received and makes searching it a breeze.
Hundreds of our McDonalds clients are using Lightyear - It's great for speeding up the entry of bills and supporting separate bill authorisation.
Lightyear is such an easy platform to use, it saves heaps of your time and every invoice is at your finger tips. The support team is awesome and you never have to wait more than a minute to speak/online chat to someone for advice or help.
Saves so much time. It is so easy to use, and the staff friendly and knowledgeable. It was very easy to train our farm managers to use. We love it!
Lightyear allows us to easily manage the accounts payable process across our entire client base. The parent dashboard gives great visibility across them all.
I've been using Lightyear for a few years for larger clients and have just recently transitioned my smaller clients across. Regardless of the size of business, Lightyear provides great efficiencies.