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Introducing Lightyear Instant Messaging

Over the past 3 months, Lightyear's remote approvals and collaboration platform has ensured that our customers Payables functions have continued to function uninterrupted whilst working remotely. Lightyear has always connected finance teams, internal approvers, bookkeepers, accountants and suppliers, all within one cloud platform accessible from a desktop, tablet and mobile App.

Now we’re taking collaboration to a WHOLE NEW LEVEL with our Instant messaging style tagging feature.  Lightyear users can now tag any other Lightyear user in the notes section and have a 2 way conversation about a documents status. The tagged users will receive a notification in their desktop notifications Bar and via the mobile app enabling live collaboration on a document level. Mmmm, a notification bar you say?  Read on.....

Introducing your Notifications Bar

Lightyear exists to speed up your communications. We have introduced a user specific notifications bar to ensure you know when something needs your attention immediately. Your notifications bar will notify you if another user tags you and if a document is assigned to you for approval, either by another user or via our approval automation rules.

But that's not all, you can perform quick actions from right within the notifications bar. Quick reply to a colleague, or approve a bill, all from right within the Notifications Bar.  In theory you could live your life just from the Notifications Bar!

Auto Assign Approvers based off any Characteristic on a Document!  

We released a really cool feature in 2019 to allow you to assign rules regards GL coding and tracking categories based on a keyword on an invoice/credit note (details here). We have now extended this to automatically route those bills to a specific approver based off the unique characteristic. And, there's more approve automation scheduled in the coming months.  It's our goal to allow you to get every single document to the right sequence of approvers without ever having to manually intervene.

Email Notifications

A hugely requested feature, you can now elect users to receive email notifications when an approval request has been assigned and they can approve the document from right within their email, without having to access the application or the mobile app. Great for light approvers, who do not regularly access Lightyear.  

Automatic Tax Override.

Many businesses are charged GST/VAT by their suppliers but are not able to claim this back, or can only claim back a reduced rate in their tax returns. The need to manually adjust the tax rates to show the relevant claimable tax rate. Not any longer... Lightyear can now automatically apply a different tax rate by supplier and gross the tax discrepancy into the invoice total.  

First Time User Setup Guide

We’ve released a major upgrade to the first time user experience for all new customers who sign up for a trial with us.

We’ve introduced 10 steps to get you going and each step is accompanied with its own video and user guide to show you how to set up Lightyear to suit your company.

New users will also be able to book a demo with our team from this new First Time User experience.

Supplier Layout Changes

We’ve made massive changes to the Suppliers page in Lightyear. Previously we displayed a list of Suppliers without any contextual information about that supplier. Whereas now, we are including additional information, such as default nominal code, default tax code, department and the number of days credit.

You can also access additional settings related to each supplier from this screen too. You will be able to access the list of products that each supplier sends you, along with supplier and data-extraction rules.

Previously all the information relating to your suppliers was in varying different location inside your Lightyear account and now we’ve brought them all under 1 tab to make them easier to find.

Extract Additional Details from Line Items

Lightyear's line-item data extraction is unmatched amongst our peers. We have now added additional fields on line item level to capture even more information at a line item level. This can be used for any detail, such as PO numbers, bill of loading numbers, anything you like!

Remember to keep track of all our feature releases here