Auto Publish to Accountancy Software

Auto Publish to Accountancy Software

Auto-Publish is suitable where users would prefer that once Bills/Credit Notes have been mapped and coded, they are automatically exported to their Accountancy Software, bypassing the Approvals process.
Please Note: This feature is currently only available to accountsIQ, iplicit, MYOB, Netsuite, QuickBooks Online, Sage Accounting/Business Cloud, Sage Intacct, Xero users.

Turning on Auto-Publish

This feature can be turned on for specific suppliers, allowing users to set up certain suppliers to be Auto-Published, rather than all or nothing.

To turn on Auto-Publish, head over to your Suppliers  and click the green pencil icon  on the supplier you want to edit. 

Scroll down to Supplier Rules and you'll see the Auto-Publish field. If you want Bills/Credit Notes from this supplier to automatically export into your Accountancy Software, select Yes. If you want Bills/Credit Notes to remain in Lightyear until any approval conditions are met, select No.


Please Note: Auto Publish can only be turned on for Suppliers which have an Accounting Supplier selected

How Auto-Publish Works

Once a Bill/Credit Note has been mapped and sent through to the Approvals tab, it will automatically try to export. When the document has been successfully exported, this will go through to Archive with an Auto Publish Successful icon  in Panel 1.

The Activity log on these documents will state the Bill successfully auto exported, similar to the below:


For a Bill/Credit Note to Auto-Publish, all required fields will need to be populated, e.g. Bill Number, Bill Date, Due Date, etc. And the line items will need GL Codes and Tax Codes on each.

Why Are My Bills/Credit Notes Not Auto-Publishing?

There are some circumstances where a Bill/Credit Note isn't able to be Auto-Published into your Accountancy Software, in which case we will hold up the document in Approvals (Single Approval Workflow) or Review (Double Approval Workflow).

This can happen for a number of reasons:
  1. If the Tax/Total extracted on a Bill/Credit Note doesn't match the calculations within Lightyear, resulting in an error bell  
  2. If there is an error upon export which would prevent the document leaving Signed Off. Details of these errors can be found within the Error Messages Returned articles for your specific Accountancy Software
  3. If the document is missing any required fields, e.g. GL Codes, Tax Codes, Invoice or Due Dates
  4. If the document is flagged as a duplicate via Lightyears duplicate flag.
When a Bill/Credit Note is held up after a failed export, there will be an Auto-Publish Failed icon  in Panel 1. When this happens, the Activity log will include the reason for the export failure, similar to the below:

Using Auto-Publish With Other Lightyear Features

While Auto-Publish is turned On for a Supplier, some other Lightyear features cannot be used in conjunction. These include:
  1. Keyword Rules
  2. Default Approver
  3. Conditional Approval/Approval by Value at a Supplier Level
If your Lightyear Account has Conditional Approval Values set up in Company Settings, these will not be triggered if Auto-Publish is turned on for a specific Supplier. 




      

    Check out our
    Product Blog Series
    to stay up to date

      • Related Articles

      • Choosing the right approvals workflow

        Choosing the right workflow is crucial to help you streamline your processes to maximise efficiencies. You can have Lightyear up and running to streamline the purchase to payables process to follow the outline below Before settling on a workflow, it ...

      • Setting your Approval Workflow

        Lightyear allows you to define your Approvals steps. Every business is different, so Lightyear lets you control how your invoices are approved, and who can approve them. Invoices are sent to your @lightyear.cloud email address by your suppliers and ...

      • Approval Task Requests

        What is an Approval Task Request? By sending one to an internal or external user, you are requesting action from them on the sent document. For example: In our team we have Jack, Mark and Lisa. I want to have Lisa approve a particular bill. I send an ...

      • What is Executive Approval?

        Executive Sign Off is an optional feature for your account. You may wish to use Executive Sign Off if your business requires a senior manager, business owner or director to sign off on ALL bills before they are sent to your accountancy software. If ...

      • I have set up a new User but they cannot see any bills in the Approval Tab

        Firstly, there may not be any bills for them to see in the Approval Tab, but this is most likely due to the User not being assigned to a Department.     If you have activated Internal Departments within Lightyear, you will need to complete the set ...