Purchasing & Accounts Payable Automation for Education
Speed up your manual processing time and reduce the associated costs.

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.
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

Paper Free
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 have to manually price check your supplier bills again with our built in Price Checking functionality. Simply upload your agreed supplier pricing.

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.

1 Click Approval
Get sign-off from each of your approvers no matter where they are based. Our multi-tiered approvals allows you to get up to 5 levels of approval across 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.

Real-Time Data
Having access to live data in a business that moves as fast as a Hospitality 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, suppliers and finance teams.
Complete your approvals and tasks, dispute bills, add notes, receive notifications and upload images of receipts on the go.

Integrate Seamlessly









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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.