Purchasing & Accounts Payable Automation Software for retail
Supercharge your profits and tackle admin-heavy tasks head on with a solution that eliminates manual data entry, improves cash flow and enhances the purchasing landscape for retailers.
An Industry Recognised App
Key Features for Retailers
Get smarter with your time and spending habits so you can boost your profit margins
Get control of spending
Allow your team members to easily create Purchase Orders and automatically route them to the appropriate approver. Gaining tighter control on what your team are purchasing reduces the chances of over ordering.
Send Purchase Orders directly to your suppliers and request acceptance notifications all from within Lightyear.
See all featuresBetter inventory monitoring
3-way matching enables you to automatically match invoices against the corresponding Purchase Order and Goods Received Note to ensure you only paying for goods that arrive at your venue.
See all featuresAutomated 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.
See all featuresStop overpaying for the same products
The price of goods and services inevitably increases, however you can keep track of these cost rises and make smarter business decisions to help reduce overheads.
Lightyear automatically flags discrepancies in pricing between the supplier invoice and agreed supplier pricing, alerting you to an increase before payment. You can use this to report on price rises throughout the year and negotiate better rates with your supplier.
See all featuresDon't pay twice
Duplicate invoices are common and hard to identify. Don't waste money double paying for the same products and services. Lightyear's AP automation automatically detects duplicate invoices and flags these to your team in the approval tab.
See all featuresAlign your approval processes
Multi-tiered approval workflows mean your team can automate the approval process across the organisation. Faster approvals means faster payments for your suppliers and an overall better relationship. Give your team a boost to negotiate better supplier terms or discounts.
Approval automation workflows can be set up by document value, supplier or keyword, for example venue location.
See all featuresOn-the-go approvals
Give your team the freedom to create Purchase Orders, view documents and approve invoices on the go, enabling smoother operations and avoiding payment delays to suppliers.
During busy period, staff may have to travel between multiple venues, so having the ability to work on the go keeps the accounts payable process moving.
See all featuresAccurate reporting for decision-making
Lightyear's line item coding functionality means you can generate detailed reports across products and services, venues or other cost centres.
7 years of historical data means your team are able to forecast seasonal trends or customer purchasing behaviour based on previous spending. This information helps make smarter decisions including availing of discounts for bulk purchasing during busy periods or popular produce, or reducing waste during quieter periods.
See all features
Lightyear has brought together all functions of AP invoice processing in a user-friendly wan and relevant to many different business areas. Everyone from the store managers and staff through to the accounts team and out senior management/operations team now have access and visibility on all invoices sent to the business at any given time.
Lightyear is easy to use and provides many functions that enable us to save time processing invoices and maintain our POS data to ensure pricing integrity.
Our interactions with Lightyear were very impressive and you developed a feature rich platform which appeared to solve all our problems for a reasonable cost.
The solution is a complete no-brainer. I would recommend to any business.
Benefits for your Retail Business
Accurate Data
Identify best selling items to create a more appealing offering, identify your popular locations, understand where your costs are going, and keep better track of your inventory
Spend Smarter
Reduce your labour overheads, get a heads up on duplicated invoices, flag product price increases, and identify consumer purchasing trends to avoid over/under ordering stock
Tighter Control
Create approval workflows to avoid unnecessary ordering, 3-way match invoices so you're only paying for the stock you receive, and get notified on fraudulent invoice with bank detail checking
Integrated Solutions
Create a 2-way communication stream between your technology solutions, eliminate duplicated work, transfer stock details from invoice to your inventory solution
Integrate with leading solutions
From accounting packages to inventory solutions, Lightyear offers seamless integration into leading systems in the retail 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 retail 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.
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.