Purchasing & Accounts Payable automation for education
Speed up your manual processing time and reduce the associated costs.
An industry recognised app
Why Lightyear?
When it comes to Educational finance, there can be a lot of complexity. There can also be high manual bill processing costs due to the lengthy time it can take to complete the process from end to end.
Education institutions and facilities have been using Lightyear to remove this complexity & reduce manual processing time to as little as a few days. This allows your finance team to become up to 80% more effective as manual Bill capture, coding, and approvals become a thing of the past & high monthly processing costs are reduced.
Lightyear for Education will also automatically reconcile your supplier statements and 3-way match your documents on a line item level allowing for the worlds most precise match.
The Lightyear Platform manages your finances from purchase order creation through to invoice & bill approvals and export to your accounting software. We have been voted the number 1 Purchasing and AP software for ease of use, value for money and customer satisfaction by Gartner, Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice in both 2020 and 2021.
Benefits for Education
Go Paperless
All your supplier bills are emailed into your Lightyear account for immediate data extraction. No more posting paper to head office or passing paper around for approval signatures.
100% Correct Pricing
Never manually price check your supplier bills again. Lightyear compares each lines' product code with your supplier's agreed price list, flagging any overcharges.
Early Payment Discounts
By speeding up the data entry and approvals process, you can process your supplier bills faster, allowing you to take advantage of early payment discounts more often.
Multi-tiered 1 Click Approvals
Get sign-off from each of your approvers remotely or on the go. Our multi-tiered approvals allows you to get up to 8 levels of approval via browser, email and our mobile app.
Grow with Lightyear
As you bring on more locations, you can create new entities in your Lightyear account for each new location in your franchise empire.
100% Accurate Real-Time Data
Having access to live data in a business is your new secret weapon to keep your business organised and agile.
Collaboration & Approvals in our free Lightyear mobile app
Lightyear's iOS and Android mobile app allows you to collaborate with your colleagues and clients, wherever and whenever.
Complete your approvals and tasks, dispute bills, add notes, receive notifications and upload images of receipts/bills on the go.
Integrate with leading solutions
From accounting packages to inventory solutions, Lightyear offers seamless integration into leading systems in the education industry. Eliminate duplicated work for your team and give them back time they need to complete more pressing tasks.
How to Automate Purchasing and Accounts Payables in the Education Industry
Education businesses can follow a variety of different workflows. You can use Lightyear to create orders and manage your purchasing process or, alternatively, if you do not use a purchasing system you can use Lightyear to automate data extraction and approval of bills without a Purchase Order document.
Order Stock and Services
Create purchase orders in a couple of clicks. Our intuitive platform stores your product information in a supplier product list. You can quickly build out your orders and then approve them in a multi-tiered approvals workflow before sending to your supplier.
Receive and Record Goods
You can create GRNs (Goods Received Notes) in Lightyear to acknowledge receipt of your goods delivery.
Bill received
Receive supplier bills (invoices) directly from your supplier in to your Lightyear account for immediate line by line data extraction.
Data extraction
Smart Extract uses AI and Machine Learning technology to instantly extract line-item data from your invoices when they reach your Lightyear account. Details include product codes, quantities, and multi-line descriptions.
Automated Bookkeeping
Lightyear's machine learning technology learns how you code each of your line items and bills so that it can automatically code your items with GL (general ledger) codes, tax rates, locations, project codes and custom classes every time.
Export purchase data to your Inventory Software
Populate your purchases into your inventory software with a few clicks to keep all your systems accurate and up to date, helping to avoid double data entry.
Price checking
Every line-item on your bills are price checked against your agreed supplier pricing to ensure you don't overpay your suppliers.
3-way match POs to GRNs to your bills
Lightyear automatically matches your POs (Purchase Orders) to your GRNs (Goods Received Notes) to your supplier bills - line by line.
Approve your bills
Your bills can move through a multi-tiered approvals workflow to ensure they are ready to be paid.
Export to your Accounting Software
At the end of your Accounts Payable flow, you can export all the details from your supplier bills to your Accounting Software.
Archive and report on your COGS
Monitor the COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) in real-time with our reporting functionality from your archive. Run reports to find the purhcase cost of all your purchases by GL code or location.
Statement Reconciliation
Save a huge amount of time with our automated supplier statement reconciliation feature. Lightyear will automatically reconcile your statement, letting you know which bills you have received, which bills you haven't, and help you request missing bill copies from your suppliers.
Click to book your 30 minute demo with an industry expert
Trusted by Leading Businesses Everywhere
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.
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!
Hundreds of our McDonalds clients are using Lightyear - It's great for speeding up the entry of bills and supporting separate bill authorisation.
With more than one million Bills processed, Lightyear continues to be an invaluable addition to Abcom’s suite of business applications.
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.
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.