Pizza Pilgrims

Who are Pizza Pilgrims?

"Pizza Pilgrims is a pizza company with 19 sites, mainly London-centric, but we also have sites outside of London. We also have a few spin-off concepts that have come off that, like our Pizza in the Post, but essentially we are a hospitality business."

What challenges did you face with your previous AP process? 

"The previous process was very, very manual. You had to look at each invoice, decide on the details that needed to be added, check everything and make sure that it picked up the right invoice number. We get a lot of invoices through, and it was taking up a lot of time.

A lot of our invoices look the same but go to different locations, and having to populate the locations on multiple lines was very time-consuming. Lightyear is a cutting edge technology."

Why did you choose Lightyear?

"I originally picked Lightyear because it was one of the cutting-edge technologies at the time, and I still think that stands.  When we first joined Lightyear around five/six years ago, there wasn't any other software that could extract all the information and go into the level of detail that we required. I think that still stands today. There are a lot of other OCR technology and other automated invoice-reading technologies out there, but we still believe that none of them quite give us the level of detail that we need.

We review it regularly, but we still stay with Lightyear."

What additional value has Lightyear added? 

"Lightyear has enabled us to have a more junior person in the team, so there's been a cost saving for the business. The data processing is sped up, you can have someone that's switched on reviewing data, and it doesn't require a lot of manual entry or editing.

Lightyear allows us to spend time looking at irregular invoices. We get lots of cleaning invoices which will always be the same, so they can be automatically processed, allowing more time to look at the irregular ones.

Another benefit is that Lightyear can code by location using keywords. We report on site and have to enter every line with a location attached, and then the fact that Lightyear just does that really quickly and easily makes it fool proof when we're processing invoices."

What is your favourite Lightyear feature? 

"There are two things:

1)  Lightyear automatically reconciles supplier statements which is really helpful and a time-saving function.

2) Auto price-checking - Lightyear automatically checks prices and flags if they have changed."

How much time does Lightyear save?

"We've definitely seen a cost and time-saving benefit. Those value-adding things like not having to manually match back a statement and flagging when a price has changed are amazing. And if you need any help, people are instantly there to help you, so it is not a stressful process."