Dear Team Member
As part of our effort to improve the way we do business, and to reduce both our costs and our carbon footprint, we are starting to use a new system for receiving and approving supplier bills called Lightyear. Lightyear is a cloud-based mailbox, approvals process and filing cabinet for bills. It means you will be able to approve and access supplier bills from any computer or tablet.
Using Lightyear means that moving forward we will be asking all our suppliers to email their sales bills (our supplier bills) as pdf documents to
YourAccountName@lightyear.cloud (Yes, that's .cloud NOT .com).
What will then happen is that we will simply log on to
www.lightyear.cloud using an email address and password, and approve the bill from inside the Lightyear website. Lightyear will extract the data from the bills that will allow us to update our inventory and accounts systems in real time without the need for manual data entry. Once it is approved at venue level the bill will then be checked and verified a second time by the Accounts team. And at each stage of the process Lightyear will date and time stamp the activity with the user’s identity. Lightyear will also file bills for us online meaning no filing cabinets, and no sending paper between venues. Lost bills will be a thing of the past.
As we move towards receiving electronic bills it is important that we continually communicate the message to our suppliers that we will now only accept pdf bills. So if you see a paper bill being handed over, please follow up with the supplier ensuring that they are sending an electronic pdf by email to the email above. It is imperative that they email Lightyear real pdfs. A real pdf is a pdf generated by a system as opposed to via a scanner or imaging software. Real pdfs contain metadata, and Lightyear reads that data. The vast majority of the world’s billing or sales system produces pdf documents upon request.
If your supplier says that they cannot send pdfs please speak to the Accounts team, but also recommend to your supplier an APP for both Android and iPhone called bill2go. It is available for about $11 as a one-off fee. That app will allow them to do all your billing from your phone or tablet, and also act as a debtor management tool for them too. Scans of paper bills that are saved, as pdf files are not real pdf bills. We want suppliers to send pdfs of bills generated by their sales systems or systems such as bill2go. These pdfs contain the data that is extracted by Lightyear.
If you have any further questions about receiving pdfs please do not hesitate to speak directly to your GM. No more paper bills lying everywhere. No filing cabinets and no storage boxes. No more asking the Accounts team for copies of bills. Let’s all move forward together, building a more organized and less cluttered workplace.
Adoption of Lightyear, and all the efficiencies that it will bring, will come easier and much quicker with our understanding of what is required, but also by keeping this requirement for our suppliers to send us pdfs at the front of our minds.
Regards,