Setting up Price Checker within Lightyear

Uploading Products - Products Catalog and Price Checker

This is a step-by-step guide to uploading Products in Lightyear. There's a multitude of benefits in doing so. You can use this as part of the initial supplier set up to automate line item coding, create your Product Catalogue in PO's so items can prefill as you type out your order, and the Price Checking feature. If you don't need Price Checker, skip ahead to the section 2: 
  1. All about Price Checker
  2. Products & Price Checker Set up
  3. Uploading your csv
  4. Here's one we prepared earlier: Download a template
The Price Checker notifies you when a supplier's on-invoice price differs from the loaded agreed price.


All about Price Checker

What is it?


One of the many benefits to Lightyear's line item extraction is the ability to conduct automated checks on supplier pricing. We call this feature.... erm... Price Checker!

In summary, the Price Checker feature automatically notifies you when a billed price differs (higher, lower) than the agreed product price.  Price Checker does this by comparing the extracted Landed Unit Cost (LUC) from bills against your pre-loaded price list.

As a bill arrives into your Approvals tray, Lightyear will recognise the product code, price check the items and flag the any variance on the agreed price. The red coloured unit price indicates a product has been over-charged when compared with the price list for this supplier. Green indicates a product is charged the same (or less) price as expected, and the non-coloured unit price, has no entry in the supplier’s price list.


The Price Checker feature is only available on bills with lines containing product codes of which are extracted by Lightyear using a Line Item Map. The Product Code needs to be exact every time. This is required so a comparison can be made between the product code on a supplier’s bill with the product price-list that you upload. If your products are mapped with a service map it will not work.


What will I see once Price Checker is setup?

Once a Price List has been set-up for a supplier and a bill arrives in your Approvals tray, Lightyear will automatically price check the product codes extracted from the bill. Lightyear will display the results using different shaded cells in the Unit Price field:




Red indicates that you have been overcharged, and Green indicates that you have been charged at or less than your agreed price (allowing for any tolerance you may have set).  Hovering over a coloured cell will display the agreed price to you.



Setup

If you wish to setup pricing you need to switch on the feature in Settings > Company Settings. Otherwise, you can proceed to upload your products without pricing to automate your coding.




Switch 'Price Checking' to the 'Yes' position:



Next, head into the Product List section of Lightyear by going to Suppliers tab > Select a supplier > Click on the green pencil icon.

Then, you'll be presented with the screen below. You have 2 options to update the Unit Price:

1) Click on the green ' +Product' button to add the details individually. If there are already existing product line items, you can add in the Unit Price by clicking on the green pencil icon. 
2) If you're loading multiple products, you can  click here to skip ahead to the 'CSV Upload' article.



You'll be asked for the following info:
  • Product Code - The code that identifies the product on your bill
  • Product Description - A description of the product on your bill
  • Default GL code - Assign a GL code to automatically populate when this product is on a bill. 
  • Default Tracking Category (if activated from your Accounting Software) - Assign a Tracking Category to automatically populate when this product is on a bill
  • Effective From/To - The date at which the product price become effective. If a bill date falls on or after the effective date, Lightyear will price-check the product. Once the To date has passed, the Price Checker will no longer function on this product.
  • Unit Price - The agreed price between you and your supplier per unit
  • Tolerance % (+/-) - A percentage tolerance for each product price. Provided the unit price on the bill falls within this tolerance of the uploaded price, Lightyear will not flag it as an overcharge. 
    • NOTE: If you want to set a variance of 1%, enter 1 into the csv. By entering 0.01 in the csv file, you are entering this as 0.01% into Lightyear. 

TIP! - Veteran users of Price Checker have shared that setting a tolerance of 1 or 2% stops Lightyear unnecessarily flagging variances caused by decimal rounding (e.g. $10.01 ,$10.02...).



CSV Upload

For longer lists of pricing, we offer bulk uploads via CSV  (comma separated values) file. All you need to do is create a CSV with the following columns:

  • Product Code
  • Product Description 
  • Account - This will look for the Code first. If you don't have a Code, enter the Description
  • Never Populate Account - Y for Yes, N for No
  • Category 1 and Category 2 - This will look for the Code first. If you don't have a Code, enter the Description
  • Unit Price (no currency symbols)
  • Effective From (Must be dd/mm/yyyy format)
  • Effective to (must be dd/mm/yyyy format)
  • Tolerance (digits only - enter 1 instead of 0.01 for the tolerance to read 1%)
  • Case Quantity (Must be a numeric value only)
  • POS Code
  • Product Unit Type - Cases or Units

Once your CSV is prepared, head to the Product List section of the Lightyear app, select the relevant supplier from the dropdown list, then click on the 'Upload CSV File' button:


Locate the CSV file on your device and select it. You'll be presented with the following pop up:


From here, click each drop down and map it to the corresponding column on your CSV. Once you're happy, click Confirm and the import will begin.

Saving a Template

When completing this CSV routine, you can save a template to remember which field names match to which column. The next time you need to bulk upload or update your Product List, this template can be selected and the information auto-populated in the correct fields for you to import.

To create a template, go through the above steps to import your CSV. When you have filled out the relevant fields, go back to the top and enter a Template Name, then click the Create Template button at the bottom of the modal.

Once this has been Created, the next CSV Import will allow you to select the template from the Choose Template at the top of the modal.

To make changes to the Template, select it from the Choose Template field and make the necessary changes to the fields and click Overwrite Template at the bottom of the modal. These changes will be saved and available to use during the next CSV Import.

To delete a Template, select from the Choose Template dropdown, and click the red X beside the template name.

For those using POs, the additional benefit of uploading these products will allow you to create a Product Catalogue. This way, as you're  Creating POs, items will prepopulate to save you time from looking items up and cross referencing any product codes/pricing. 

Download a copy of the Template file 

See below to download a copy of the upload template with the prefilled Columns required.





      

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