Step 5: Customise your settings
After you've connected to your Accounting Software, you'll need to visit Company Settings and customise your Lightyear account. Simply select Settings > Company Settings from the options on the left of your Lightyear user interface.
The options that appear on the left may differ slightly depending on what Company Settings you have enabled.
Let's take a look at the Company Settings that are available and what they mean:
General
Redirect Email
If your Lightyear account receives an email that does not contain an invoice, we will forward the email to this address so that you don't lose anything. It's best to set this as an email account that you check regularly, just to make sure you don't miss anything.
Make sure that this email address is something other than your @lightyear.cloud address.
Connect business to accountancy software?
Lightyear directly integrates with many leading accounting applications, and we're always expanding our partnership list. Here you can link your Lightyear account with your supported accounting software to ensure seamless invoice data syncing.
You've probably already covered this in Step 1, but if not, click here to read about connecting to your Accountancy software.
Allow Lightyear support?
When enabled, this will allow the Lightyear Support Team access to your account so that we can provide help with any issues you may have. This is enabled by default, but can be disabled at any time.
Purchase Orders
Purchase Orders allows for the creation, approval, ordering and completion of Purchase Orders.
For a more in depth look at the functionality of this solution, visit our Purchase Orders section.
Auto Smart Extract and Default Extraction Type
These settings apply to our Smart Extract feature.
For full details on these settings, click here.
Invoice Approval Workflow
This is where you can choose the approval settings for your invoices, which are based on the size of your business and how many approvals you would like on each document:
- Single - Invoices are signed off by a single user. This is the quickest and most simple workflow within Lightyear.
- Double Approval - Invoices are initially approved and then signed off by a secondary user to ensure accuracy. You can set Users up to approve invoices, sign off on them, or both.
- Executive Approval - Invoices are approved, then signed-off by either 1, 2 or 3 Executives. After selecting Executive Approval, users must be given the Executive Sign-off privilege to perform sign-off.
A user's approval settings can be set up within the Users section.
Internal Departments
Lightyear' s Departments functionality allows you to organise suppliers and users so that the relevant people are only seeing bills that are relevant to their role. In a Hotel, the Head of Housekeeping doesn't need to see all of the invoices for the kitchen, and the Chef can do their job without knowing what cleaning supplies have been ordered, so Departments allows Lightyear to put bills in front of the people who know why they are being sent a request for payment!
With this enabled, you'll be able to set up groups of users and suppliers, allowing you to decide who in your organisation is able to view and approve invoices from specific suppliers.
Send Bill Task Customisation
Bill Tasks are approval tasks that you can send to other Lightyear users, or externally via email. This is somewhat similar to the process many business use of sticking a bill in an email, copying one or more managers with a request to approve. Bill Tasks allows this to fit within your approval process, with these actions logged within the activity of each bill for audit purposes.
- Auto Approve - With this enabled, bills will automatically move to the next tab in the approvals workflow after a bill task is approved
- Manager Approval - With this enabled, a second Bill Task will automatically be sent to a user's Manager, after the user has approved the task.
Keyword rule automation
Does one supplier provide goods and services to multiple parts of your business, while sending all bills to the accounts team? Keyword Rules Automation allows you to set custom rules up at a supplier level to determine how bills are coded and route bills to certain approvers based on a keyword, this could be a "site ID", a Purchase Order reference or any uniquely identifiable string of characters. This means bills go straight where they are supposed to, as soon as the data has been extracted from the bill.
An in depth look at configuring this can be found here.
Price Checking
Sick of being overcharged? If you upload an agreed price from your supplier, Lightyear will automatically check the prices on each invoice received and alert you to any discrepancies.
Inventory/POS
It's all well and good to automate the Account Payable side of the business, but if these bills still need to get printed out and handed to your Inventory/Stocktake Manager for them to manually key each line into another System, Lightyear has a solution for that too!
An in-depth look at Inventory, including our extensive list of tried and tested preset export formats can be found here.
Sender email (BETA - Only applies to Purchase Orders)
If utlising Lightyear's Purchase Order functionality to generate Purchase Orders, you can define both the email address that the PO is sent from, as well as the default email address the supplier will reply to.
Once you've adjusted your settings as needed, click 'Update Settings' to save your changes.
Purchase Orders
Months in the making, Purchase Orders is the number one requested feature by Lightyears clients. The Purchase Orders tab within Company Settings allows you to configure details related to the sending of POs.
PO Transaction Numbers
Whilst in Beta, the PO Prefix and numerical sequence is locked, beginning at PO 0001 and increasing sequentially with each Purchase Order sent. This will be opened up to allow for customisation for users who already have a PO process, or would like to have a unique Prefix.
Delivery Addresses
This setting allows for the input of default delivery addresses, which will be presented in a dropdown box when creating a Purchase Order.
To add an address press "+ Address" and input the delivery details.
Form Customisation
Form Customisation allows an image file to be set, which will appear on POs sent to suppliers.
Supplier Email Settings
The Supplier Email Settings allows for the customisation of the communication with the supplier.
The Subject and Body fields will define the default values in the email sent to the supplier. Don't worry, this can be manually adjusted for each PO if needed!
"Auto send supplier order email" will generate an email to the supplier once a Purchase Order is confirmed. For businesses that primarily use POs for internal reference only, this can be switched off.
"Enable supplier response link" provides a URL to the supplier that they can use to Accept or Decline the PO, and add a response message if needed.
NEXT STEP: Now, you've got Lightyear customised just the way you want, let's download the mobile app next for approvals on the go
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