Automated Data with Lightyear

What does Lightyear automate?

Lightyear can speed up your approval process by automatically applying certain rules when a bill moves to the Approval Tab. Let's take a look at what can be automated.

Mapping (Processing Tab)

When you receive a bill from a supplier for the first time, you'll need to search for and apply a map. Once this has been done, Lightyear remembers the email address the bill was received from, and the Map ID that was used, then automatically applies this to any future bills sent from the same email address. You can view which maps are saved for each supplier in the Supplier section of the app. 

When you click the suppliers page in the Nav , you will be taken to all of your active suppliers in one page.



In this Manage Suppliers page, find the supplier you want by either searching in the search box to the top right, or scrolling. Once you find the supplier, click on the Green Pencil Icon  to edit. You will be taken to that suppliers details screen. 

Notice we have three tabs along the top. Profile, Extraction Rules and then Products/Rules Automation. 


Here, we want to click the Extraction Rules tab to look at Maps.

These can be re-ordered using the arrows on the left, determining which map we try first, or deleted entirely using the delete button on the right.

Supplier Rules

When setting up or editing a supplier, you can set a series of defaults that will be applied to bills as they come into the Approvals Tab. To do so, click on the Profile tab:

In the screen that appears you have a number of customisation options to edit for the selected supplier. 


The main ones are
  • Default GL Code - Automatically applies the selected GL code to all lines on the bill. Note that this will be overridden by any Default GL Codes set in Product Details (see below).
  • Default Tax/Tax Free Code - Automatically applies the selected Tax Code to all lines on the bill
  • Category - Automatically applies the selected Tracking Category to all lines on the bill
  • Number of Days Credit - Select a number of days from the bill date (or from End Of Month) to automatically populate a due date on the bill. Note that this will only apply if no due date is extracted from the bill itself
Depending on your accounting software, you will have different options to the above. 

Automated Approver

In this same section, you can set a specific approver to a supplier. For example, If I want Ellen in my company to be the only one that approves anything from my Test supplier, in the approver box, I can select Ellen. 


Once these are set, any bill sent in from a previously mapped supplier will go straight to the Approval tab with these defaults in place.

Product Details

In the Product List section of the app, you can assign a Default GL Code to individual products. This means that when you receive a Line Item Bill with this product, Lightyear will automatically apply the selected GL to this line only. Note that this will override anything set as a default Supplier GL Code.

Clicking our Products tab to the top of the Manage Supplier page we can take a look at this in more detail.

In the screen that appears, you can then update, edit and save a huge amount of settings per product code. Another excellent way to save time.

In the above, we have a list of products that we have imported via CSV (more on that here - LINK). We click the green pencil icon   to open the customising options you can set.


Any line Items with a default GL Code set in product details will have this GL automatically applied when the bill moves to the Approval tab. Any other lines will use the Supplier GL Code if one is set.




      

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