How LN Price & Partners Saves $38k+ Every Year on AP Costs
LN Price & Partners is a family-owned group of businesses based in Busselton, Western Australia, run by Denis Price and his brother Alan for almost 40 years. What started as a single supermarket has grown into the primary logistics contractor for Metcash's IGA brand across Western Australia. Alongside transport, LN Price also operates several other businesses (including a news agency and its own fuel site in Perth), supported by 55 staff and roughly 100 subcontracted trucks.
Results with Lightyear
Before Lightyear, the finance team ran accounts payable entirely on paper through Business Suite, a legacy, server-based system with no plugin or integration ecosystem. Invoices travelled by internal mail between six offices, often taking weeks to reach the head office for sign-off, pushing the month-end close-out as late as the 20th of the following month.
Since implementing Lightyear, which now handles around 1,000 invoices a month, LN Price has cut invoice processing time from weeks to seconds, saved them roughly $800 a week in AP costs, and freed up their finance team to take on more work without added headcount.
6 Offices & A Long Paper Trail
LN Price's accounts payable process was entirely manual, with paper invoices physically routed through internal mail between six offices before reaching the head office for sign-off. This created significant delays.
“On the paper-based system, we could be waiting weeks for an invoice to come through internal mail from office A to office B. For example, if we wanted to close off in July, we'd be waiting until the 20th of August for all the paperwork to come in.” — Denis Price, Director.
The manual process also made it hard for Denis’s team to track where a specific invoice was in the approval chain at any given time.
“With paperwork physically moving between offices, invoices frequently got stuck on people's desks, in their in-tray.”
LN Price & Partner needed a solution that would integrate well with their accounting software. The company’s CFO had implemented Lightyear at a previous employer, so she already knew the platform and its value first-hand.
“Once we found Lightyear, we were pretty excited by its capabilities and how that could save our team some time for those tasks.”
The cost of $20,000 seemed small compared to the downtime of waiting 2 weeks for approval.
AI-Powered AP That Fits Any System
“Lightyear just fits together with our accounting software like a hand in a glove.”
Denis was struck by how quickly Lightyear could be implemented, despite years of experience rolling out other software across the business.
“Lightyear is very easy to use. I've done hundreds of software implementation projects, but I had this up and running in just 2 weeks: importing our ledger codes, importing our suppliers, setting up the import between Business Suite, setting up the return import to bring all the details back, and training the staff.”
Denis highlighted that, beyond the time savings, Lightyear has improved data extraction accuracy and the ability to catch duplicate invoices before they're paid.
“With Lightyear, our efficiencies are things like capturing GST properly and making sure there's no duplicate invoices. It’s now a lot less paper in the office, too.”
When asked what benefits he sees from his team using Lightyear day-to-day, Denis pointed to compliance and the ease of retrieving historical invoices as the standout advantage.
“Before, if you wanted to find an invoice from a supplier from 3 months ago, it was a filing cabinet across six offices. Now with Lightyear, we can remain compliant and find historical invoices in a minute.”
With Lightyear, we're saving 0.5 FTE’s worth of wages.
$38k+ Savings Annually on Staffing Costs
“With Lightyear, we're saving half a head, which is roughly $800 a week in wages.”
That shift in capacity shows up in LN Price’s finance team.
“The two people that are currently working in our AP department, they're able to take on more tasks in the same time.”
When we asked Denis what he'd tell other logistics business owners considering automating their accounts payable, he said:
“Lightyear's got a pretty good AI-based data extraction engine that can read a handwritten bill or a photo of a bill. It's about moving with the times, and making your office more efficient, because at some point, your opposition is going to become more efficient than you.”
Ready to start saving $30k+ annually on AP costs?