Step 7: Invite your team

Step 7: Invite your team

Change Management

To ensure a successful Lightyear rollout, it's important you bring your staff on the journey.   We recommend you follow the below steps to ensure a smooth transition:
  1. Build an Implementation plan - Pick a 'Go-Live' date (we recommend the 1st day of a month) and work backwards through all the setup and training steps required.  Ensure to leave yourself enough wriggle room for unexpected delays.  
  2. Communicate the plan - Communicate the plan to your team, and inform them why you are making this change and why it will benefit both the organisation and their specific role.
  3. Train the team - Now that you have set the scene, send out the invitations and set up some training.  We recommend you train approver's in a shorter session than your admins. 
  4. Pick a champion - Assign a champion(s) for each department.  These person(s) will be the internal Lightyear experts and first point of contact for any queries. 
  5. Regular check in - After the new processes are launched, check in with your team to see how they're going with the changes.  
  6. Continual training -  Lightyear release new features every few weeks, It's important to stay up to date with these to ensure you are getting the most from the system, and organise any training required for your teams.
See further below for guidance on setting up new users as well as a template to help with staff communications. 

Creating a new user

Before adding a new user, have a look at this table on users and permission to determine what rights you'd like to assign to your team. 




Head over to Settings > Users

See this article for adding users via the Users & Companies dashboard.
This is a massive time saver for those managing Parent/Child accounts to assign multiple accounts to a single user. 



Click 'Add user' and enter their details:



Assigning user roles

Bill Permissions

Lightyear allows you to assign a set of permissions to a user.  


  1. Company Admin - These users will have full access rights across the account including Users and Companies and Billing
  2. Approval Task & Archive - These users will have read only access to the Archive and Approval Tasks assigned to them.
  3. Approval Task Only - These users will only have access to their 'Approvals task' inbox.  This is the most restrictive permission, they are unable to edit data or see any invoices which are not specifically assigned to them.  
  4. Standard User - here you can customize which permission sets they should have. They can be assigned a single set of permissions or a combination or all three of the below.
    1. Approver - These users will have edit access to the Approvals tab and be able to view and edit the invoice data.  They will have read only access to the Signed Off tab.  They will only view invoices for their 'Department' if the Departments feature is turned on
    2. Accounts Payable - These users will have edit access to the Review tab and be able to view the Approvals tab.  They can view invoices from all departments if the Departments feature is turned on.  
    3. Processing - These users will have edit access to the processing tab to Apply and Request maps and manually enter data.  
Note: a standard user with all three permissions assigned does not mean the will have the same permissions as a Company Admin

PO Permissions

If you have POs activated, you will note there are two sections of permissions.   In order to assign a user permissions for POs, note you will need to assign at least one of the Bill Permissions in order to allow this. You can choose a set of permissions or combine these as you see fit. They're pretty straightforward, click on the image to see the permission sets as below.




Approval Task Permissions



This will give a user with Approval Task or Approval Task & Archive permissions the ability to edit document data when reviewing the task for approval.

Not ticking this box will lock the document data granting the user a view only access. No changes will be able to be made saved by this user.



Once permissions have been set, click " Add User" or if you're updating a user profile, click "Update".  

If the user is a new user, they will be sent a welcome email to register their Lightyear Profile.
If the user is an existing Lightyear user, they will be sent a notification email regards the new permission and the company will be automatically added to their company picker list.

You will be able to see who has accepted their first invitations when checking the Status of the users. 
  1. New means they are yet to accept their first invitation
  2. Active means they have accepted their first invitation
Users have 7 days to accept their invitation otherwise the invitation link with expire and you will need to resend and invitation link. See below.

You may also need to perform the following actions respectively: 

  1. Green pencil - edit/adjust their permissions which applies upon saving 
  2. Red Trash - delete a user from the account
  3. Grey reset icon - you can send your team a link to reset their password
  4. Grey email icon - resend the invitation link if their first one has expired

Inform your staff

Implementing a new system is always a big change for any organisation, so no doubt your staff will have questions and concerns. We cannot stress this enough, but getting buy-in from your team as to what is going on with Lightyear will make the process really seamless. To make your lives easier, we have drafted this email/letter which you may wish to circulate or use as part of your communication. 


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,

NEXT STEP: 
Now that your team know what's going on, let's let your Suppliers know too! 





      

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