Wishlist decreases accounts payable data entry & reporting time by 92% with Lightyear

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Wishlist, a not-for-profit organisation that cares for the growing health needs of patients and families in the Sunshine Coast and Gympie region of Australia, just received a massive productivity boost from Lightyears AP Automation platform! Tara Osborn, their Finance Officer, attests that Lightyear has helped them reduce time spent on manual data entry and reporting by a whopping 92%. In addition, Wishlist can now centralise data for multiple locations in the cloud, streamline approvals workflows, and say goodbye to paperwork and chasing multiple approvals for their invoices.

Manual To Automation - Reducing Data Entry From 30 Hrs To 2 Hrs

Before implementing Lightyear, Wishlist faced multiple challenges with its AP process. Wishlist’s accounts team spent upwards of 30 hours per month manually entering invoices into MYOB. This process was error-prone and costly. Wishlist also faced challenges with lost and duplicate documents, manually reconciling supplier statements and routing invoices to relevant approvers promptly and efficiently. These challenges lead the Finance team to explore new, innovative solutions to streamline their Accounts Payable.

Implementing Lightyear allowed Wishlist to digitise the receipt of invoices, immediately removing paper from the process and avoiding lost documents. Lightyear can extract line item data with 100% accuracy in seconds, eliminating tedious manual data entry and minimising the risk of human error. Lightyear then automatically codes the document and flags duplicates and pricing fluctuations, reducing late fees and preventing overpayment. Finding supplier invoices used to take the team 10+ minutes, now it takes seconds.

The Wishlist team now spend less than 2 hours per month entering their accounts payable data - A 93% time-saving!

Improved Efficiency Across Multiple Locations

Wishlist's rapid growth presented difficulties in keeping track of invoices from multiple sites and locations. Their lack of a unified system led to inefficiencies for the finance team and many other departments. Documents were being received via physical mail or email and then scanned or photographed, which meant reconciling what was received versus ordered was time-consuming. This resulted in up to 4 hours per month spent on reporting!

Lightyear provides the platform for Wishlist to centralise all Accounts Payable data and create unique approval workflows for each site location. Thanks to this, Wishlist can now easily manage multiple locations and has reduced reporting time to under one hour - an incredible achievement. This means that reporting and manual data processing time has been reduced by a massive 92% overall.

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Reducing Invoice Approvals From 10-Days To Just Seconds

Like many not-for-profits, Wishlist's governance requires invoices to be authenticated by two people. Previously, Wishlist would staple an approval form to each invoice and require physical signatures from the CFO and CEO. Many invoices would get stuck on somebody's desk or lost, often leading to lengthy delays.

Lightyear has helped streamline this process and make it much more efficient. By removing paper processes and introducing an online, mobile and email-based system for approvals, Wishlist has reduced its average approval time to just three days. The busy CFO and CEO at Wishlist now have the power to approve invoices in just seconds - no matter where they are.

Overcoming Staff Resistance To Streamline Their AP Processes

Tara encountered two main challenges regarding staff buy-in: the old system "worked fine"; and Lightyear was feared to be too complicated for people to adjust. To overcome these concerns, Tara took advantage of Lightyear's 30-day free trial and Let's Get Going implementation team. She used this time to show the staff how Lightyear could help save time and costs. The team realised their rapid growth required a better system before further expansion could happen. Ultimately, this led to successful staff engagement and understanding of the new business process and the value Lightyear delivers.

Since implementing Lightyear, Wishlist has achieved an average of 20 - 30% savings on their monthly costs, slashed approval time by 70%, reduced reporting time by 75%, and increased overall efficiency by 79.3%.

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