Options for automating your approvals
This article is your one stop shop for all things related to approvals in Lightyear. This article aims to tie it altogether to ensure you have the right workflows in place to help streamline your operations and how to set them up.
Departments
Using Departments allows you to group suppliers together and then you define which Users can see which Departments (suppliers). This allows certain bills to be presented to certain users, giving you better security and control. For example a hotel would have a Kitchen Dept and Bar Dept, where you would add the kitchen's suppliers to the Kitchen Dept & the bar's suppliers to the Bar Dept. The next step would be to add the bar staff's Lightyear users to the Bar Dept and so on. This way the bar staff would only be able to view the Bar's invoices.
HOW TO ACTIVATE DEPARTMENTS
Head to Company Settings > Internal Departments > Yes > Update Settings
Departments will only be visible as a drop down once the feature is turned on.
Click
here for a guide on how to set up Departments and for more information.
Approval Settings
With every business being so different, everyone have different needs. Lightyear's Approval Workflows can be as simple or complex as your business needs and is scalable as your business grows. This is a global setting on an account-by-account basis, so if you have multiple Lightyear accounts that require different structures, you can tailor this to each account. There are 3 options for you to choose from:
Single
The fastest and simplest way to manage your documents. This is the ideal structure for smaller businesses as it allows Lightyear and the accounts payable process to be managed entirely by one person. After document approval, invoices move from Approval to Signed Off, ready for export.
Double Approval
This option adds a second layer of approval for documents. Once approved, documents move to Review where they must be signed off again before they can be exported or archived. This is suited better to medium sized businesses, where a dedicated Accounts Payable employee or team may have final say in what gets approved.
Under a Double Approval Workflow, you can turn on Approval by Value. Click here for a more in depth look at Approval by Value
Executive Approval
Building on top of Double Approval, setting your approval process to Executive means multiple approvals are required before an invoice is signed off. After the initial approval, you can set up a further 1, 2 or 3 required approvals by chosen executive employees. The documents won’t be signed off until the correct number of executive approvals has been met.
Click here for a more in depth look at Executive Approval.
HOW TO SET UP YOUR APPROVALS PROCESS
Head to Company Settings > Approval Workflow > select either the Single, Double or Executive option (and if you select Executive, you need to choose the number of Executives that are required to sign off on each bill, before final Sign Off) ... and then Update Settings
Bill Task
Bill Tasks are great for those one-off approvals... where you need or want to get someone else to approve the bill... someone outside of the normal approvals workflow. This feature does not need to be activated and is easily accessible on every bill, via the MORE > Send Bill Task option.
HOW TO SEND A BILL TASK
Select a bill in the Approvals Workflow. Click on the grey Task Approver icon to assign a Bill Task.
1. To a User (someone who already a Lightyear User in the Lightyear account)
This user will receive the Bill Task via the Communications tab when logged into Lightyear. A badge with the number of unread tasks will be shown to them. When the User clicks into their tasks, they will be able to view a copy of the bill with the option to Approve/Reject/Un-assign the task, and the ability add notes to the bill.
2. To a Contact (someone who does not have/may not require regular access to Lightyear). This user will receive an email with a copy of the bill attached as a pdf. A link will give the user the option to Approve/Reject/Un-assign the task and add notes to the bill as well.
See
here for more information on Bill Tasks and the additional settings for this feature.
Auto Approve
This setting compliments the Bill Task functionality. If you select Yes to activate this feature, when a Bill Task is approved by a User/Contact, the bill will automatically transition to the Review Tab.
HOW TO ACTIVATE AUTO APPROVE
Head to Company Settings > Auto Approve > Yes > Update Settings
See here for more information on Bill Tasks and the additional settings for this feature.
Manager Approval
Another feature in conjunction with Bill Tasks is the Manager Approval. With this setting turned on, you can enforce a secondary approval to all bills that certain users approve. When setting up users, you can assign a Manager for that particular user, so once a Bill Task is sent to a User ... and the bill is authorised by them ... the bill will automatically be sent to their manager as a secondary Approval Request, saving you from having to send multiple tasks and verify the approval of the bill.
Note - this Manager Approval is only enforced for Bill Tasks - it does not get forced when that User approves a bill as part of their normal Approvals workflow.
HOW TO ACTIVATE MANAGER APPROVAL
Head to Company Settings > Manager Approval > Yes > Update Settings
See
here for more information on Bill Tasks and the additional settings for this feature.
If you have any other questions or wish to discuss best practices for your set up, please reach out to
support@teamlightyear.cloud
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