How Withington Girls' School Graduated to Paperless Invoice Processing with Lightyear

About Withington Girls School

Withington Girls’ School employs approximately 165 staff, including Vicky Bickerton, who works within the finance team as Assistant Bursar and has been with the school for the past eight years. Working alongside Vicky are three additional finance members in billing, payroll and purchasing, overseen by a Bursar.

With decades of experience between them, it was important for the team to operate more efficiently to provide support to each department across this high-performing school, which was named Northwest Independent School of the Decade by The Sunday Times in 2020.

With the school being funded mostly by private fees split across 10 months, cash flow needed to be managed appropriately to accommodate the dip in funding during July and August. This meant more control over purchasing and approvals, faster supplier payments to ensure stock and better visibility over spending.

The Challenge - A pigeon hole processing nightmare

For a long time, the team had been managing supplier invoices manually.

Vicky says, "When I first started, it was all paper copies. Invoices would arrive via the post or by email, in which case they would be printed off. The team would add the coding by hand on each invoice, which would then be put in the pigeonholes of heads of departments for sign off before being returned to the finance department for payment. This could easily take up to two weeks to come back to us."

Recognising that this process was less than efficient, the team moved to a platform that offered more automation, although still required human intervention and did not allow the movement of invoices to be tracked. “Approvals were still taking too long, we could not see where invoices were being held up and sometimes we didn't realise invoices were missing until we were contacted by the supplier asking for the payment."

The Solution: Learning to work smarter

"We moved to Access Financials for our Nominals and Accounting," says Vicky, "and that's when we moved to Lightyear, which is a much more advanced solution."

From line-item data extraction and approvals to reporting and dashboards, Lightyear offered the team a platform to gain more control over the payables documents coming in and out of the school.

"I think the whole system has been really good. The visibility of invoices has helped enormously. Seeing the documents coming in, they're logged on the system, and we can see where they are. It makes processing much easier. It's a very intuitive system."

"I love that you can see who the invoice has been assigned to and how much it is for. It flags if there are discrepancies in the bank details or agreed pricing. The processing of invoices through the system is really straightforward. I like that approvers can still see their invoices even after they are signed off."

Access's recent integration with Lightyear also allows the team to pick up duplicate invoices in the system, avoiding the issue of double payments to suppliers.

The Results: Excelling in accounts payable

"The Lightyear system itself I really like! It makes our Purchase Ledger Admin's job considerably easier and saves time. If a colleague needs to be reminded to approve an invoice, for example, an email can be sent with just a click of a button."

The approval time of invoices has also drastically improved. Before automation, invoice approvals could take around two weeks. Since the implementation of Lightyear, that has significantly reduced to approximately one day.

"The support was also fantastic. Our implementation consultant, Phil, was amazing. He was so patient with us. He knew when we would be doing a payment run and dedicated an hour to us in case we needed additional support during that time."

When asked what advice Vicky would give someone looking at Lightyear for AP automation, she said:

"I would definitely recommend it in terms of a system for automating your invoice processing and providing visibility of spending. It's so user-friendly and robust in comparison to other systems. I am able to reset passwords if needed, but it requires very little training."