Purchasing & Accounts Payable Automation For Franchises
Are you a franchise in need of an all in one solution to automate your Purchasing & invoice/bill approvals across multiple sites? Lightyear is your answer!
Why Lightyear?
Running a franchise can be difficult, with multiple sites and often times different accountants/bookkeepers for each one. This can make it very hard to co-ordinate between the individual locations, often leading to late, missing and damaged documents - especially if they are still using older paper based solutions.
Franchises use Lightyear to improve internal controls and communication between the individual franchise-franchisee sites. Lightyears secure system allows you to control who has access to the individual site child accounts, the level of access each user has. We also ensure that all your documents are stored in a centralised archive meaning as soon as the documents are uploaded by individual stores they are immediately available for processing.
Benefits for Franchises
No More Paper
All your supplier bills are emailed into your Lightyear account for immediate data extraction. Never again have to post paper to head office and pass paper around for approval signatures.
Get Consistent Data
Lightyear extracts all the details from your line items and applies autmated coding rules to make sure everything is coded consistently and accurately every time.
Get 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.
Grow with your Business
As you bring on more locations into your growing franchise business, you can create new entities in your Lightyear account for each new location in your franchise empire.
Approve bills in 1 click
Get approval 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.
Get going in a matter of minutes
Our intuitive software allows you to get up and running with your Accounts Payable in minutes. Simply start sending your supplier invoices into Lightyear and our proprietary data extraction technology will extract your data in real time.
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 Seamlessly
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How to Automate Purchasing and Accounts Payables in Franchises
Franchise 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.
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.
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.
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.
Trusted by Leading Accountants and Businesses Everywhere
"Hundreds of our McDonalds clients are using Lightyear - It's great for speeding up the entry of bills and supporting separate bill authorisation."
Max Telford, CEO
Maxtel Software
“With more than one million bills processed, Lightyear continues to be an invaluable addition to Abcom’s suite of business applications."
Jim Hawkins, CEO Abcom Software
"Lightyear has an easy to use interface, eliminating data-entry and facilitating better business processes around the accounts payable function."
Mitch Stone, PartnerPKF Sydney
"The software itself it very user friendly, making our processes much more efficient and eliminating our need for paper in the accounts payable process"
Pearse Mulvenna, Financial Controller
Andras House
"I love that all my actions can be done in one place - Lightyear stores/archives all information received and makes searching it a breeze."
Sharon Batty, Accountant
"The beauty of Lightyear is that everything happens before it reaches our accounting software which makes the process much more flexible and accurate."
Glenda McKechnie, Accounts Payable
Stone & Wood
"Since we started using Lightyear, I have saved at least 4 hours a week in wages. We run two entities and I was able to create a sister company at no extra cost."
Tamara Miller, Accounts
Border Inn Hotel
"Simplicity - easy for non-finance users to navigate, a clear audit trail on all interactions with our docs and it is very cost-efficient."
Merran Brookman, Financial Controller
Zagame Corporation
"Lightyear tells you what bills are missing and allows you to contact the supplier to request missing bills directly from the software. Amazing!!!"
Christine So, Bookkeeper
The MBA Partnership
"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!"
Nicole McLean, Assistant Accountant
Compass Agribusiness
"Lightyear allows us to easily manage the accounts payable process across our entire client base. The parent dashboard gives great visibility across them all."
Daniel Hardy, Director
ProAMS
"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."
Katherine Powell
"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."
Chris Styant
"The Lightyear team are fantastic to deal with - knowledgable 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."
Justin N, GM
