Chris Gregg, CEO, explains: ‘’Our customer insights team engaged with hundreds of mid-market finance teams to understand what their most costly and time-consuming procurement tasks were. Top of the list was the process of manually matching PO line items to goods received records and then to vendor bill line items. Finance teams estimated up to 50% of their entire AP process was spent on PO, receipt and bill matching, so that became our focus - to save finance teams 50% of their procurement time by completely automating this process. And when we say completely automating, we mean right down to the line and product code level. We believe we are the first SaaS solution in the world to offer this level of automation to Finance teams”

According to the 2021 Payables Insight Report, within the last year 3-Way Matching has become the second greatest challenge for accounting teams, second only to manual data entry and inefficient processes - which Lightyear also solves for.

Lightyear believes that this new feature is a complete game-changer for accounting teams. It is now possible for them to instantly match purchase orders with GRNs (goods received notes) and vendor bills (invoices) - saving up to 50% of not only the total matching cost, but also halving the time it takes to process an AP bill. Faster approvals can lead to businesses more often availing of early settlement discounts, which equates to further cost savings.

The 3-Way Matching builds upon Lightyear’s recently launched Purchase Order Platform. Large businesses want a feature-rich (yet intuitive), easy-to-use and affordable PO option. Lightyear’s PO Platform provides all of this plus added security and time savings due to the automation and transparency of the approvals matrix. The 3-Way Matching gives finance teams real-time visibility of the entire ‘Procure to Pay journey’ in one easy to understand screen.

Users of Lightyear’s Purchase Order Platform will be able to take advantage of its full suite of functionality alongside 3-Way Matching:

• Create, approve & order within Lightyear, or Sync purchase orders from external PO systems
• Advanced approvals routing and control
• Goods received tracking
• Invoice to PO line-by-line automated matching, and vice-versa
• Reporting insights and KPIs
• Supplier management
  

Chris goes on to say, “Our research revealed that many finance teams already have procurement built into their own systems, but those systems didn’t provide automated receipt or invoice matching. We’re pleased to announce that we have also built the ability to import POs into Lightyear from any third party system via email or desktop upload, bringing Lightyear’s advanced PO matching to the world of legacy PO systems as well. This means that no matter what PO system a finance team is using, Lightyear can provide advanced 3-Way Matching capabilities as a plug-in service to their existing PO system. We will look to further enhance this integration experience with our upcoming Open API”  

Of the customers that took part in the beta testing process, all confirmed that they have saved more than 50% of time on tasks related to the 3-Way Matching process.

“It is like having an additional person in the accounts department” - Habitat for Humanity Northern Region.