Lightyear Virtual Assistant: a VA who keeps supplier invoices moving from Processing to paid

Nobody searches “lightyear virtual assistant” because accounts payable is their passion. You search it because the deliveries do not stop. A venue takes bread, produce, meat, dairy and a beverage drop before lunch, a pharmacy takes a wholesaler tote every morning, and every one of those arrivals is an invoice that has to be checked, coded, approved and eventually paid without double-paying, overpaying or missing the credit you were owed. Lightyear already did the clever part: born in a Sydney hospitality back office and built by a team now headquartered in Belfast, it extracts your invoices down to the line item, carries GST properly and syncs to Xero and MYOB. What it cannot do is be the person who works the workflow every day. That person is currently you, at 11pm, with a stack of delivery dockets.

Lightyear’s own customer numbers talk about cutting bookkeeping time by 40 to 50 per cent. The catch in that sentence is that someone still has to do the other half, daily, on Australian hours, inside your account. That is the job this page is about.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Lightyear

Morning, before the first delivery is even signed for. The Processing panel gets cleared. Overnight, supplier invoices have landed through each company’s dedicated Lightyear email address, and the extraction has already read them down to the line item. Your VA checks what it read: supplier, invoice number, date, GST treatment and the line detail against the source document. Most invoices sail through. The ones that need a human are the new supplier whose layout Lightyear has not seen, the handwritten adjustment on a produce docket, and the invoice that is actually a statement in disguise. This is data entry in the same way air traffic control is watching screens: the value is in the exceptions.

Then coding, with the rules doing the heavy lifting. Lightyear’s GL coding rules mean a supplier whose invoices always code the same way should never need manual coding twice. Your VA applies account codes, tax rates and categories per entity, and, more importantly, builds the rule whenever coding is predictable and maintains the rule set when it stops being true: a supplier changes ABN, you restructure the chart of accounts, a new venue opens with its own tracking. Good rule hygiene is the difference between a Lightyear that gets faster every month and one that needs the same clicks forever.

Mid-morning, the approvals chase. This is the part nobody warns you about with AP automation: the software routes the bill to your venue manager for approval, and the bill then sits there, because your venue manager is running a service. Your VA works the approvals workflow like a job, not a queue. Bills routed to the right chain with the right dollar limits, stuck approvers nudged, approvals reassigned when someone is on leave, and anything ageing past its payment terms flagged to you before it becomes a supplier withholding your Friday delivery.

Weekly, the money-protection work. Two Lightyear features earn their keep only if someone actually runs them, and this is where the VA quietly pays for themselves. Supplier statement reconciliation matches the monthly statement against the invoices already in the system, so your VA catches the invoice that never arrived, requests the copy, flags the credit that was promised in March and never showed, and stops you paying a statement total that includes something you already paid. And line-item price checking against your loaded price files catches the supplier who moved the price of chicken breast eight per cent without a phone call. The VA logs the variance and drafts the query to the rep; you decide whether to push back or change supplier.

Where you use Purchasing, the matching loop. POs raised and routed for approval, goods received recorded against them when the delivery lands, and the invoice matched to both, so a short delivery or a substitution gets caught while the credit is still winnable rather than discovered at month end by your bookkeeper, who by then can prove you were shorted but cannot do anything about it.

End of the cycle, export and the payment run. Signed-off bills push to Xero, MYOB AccountRight or MYOB Business with the source document attached, and any failed sync gets fixed rather than left as a silent gap between Lightyear and the ledger, which keeps the Xero side reconciling cleanly. Then the payment run: the VA builds the batch in Xero or MYOB from the exported bills, checks it against approved invoices only, and hands it to you ready to authorise at the bank. Prepared by the VA, released by you, every time.

The honest bit

A few things Lightyear genuinely will not do, whoever you hire, and you should hear them before a discovery call rather than after.

Lightyear does not pay your suppliers, and it does not even build the payment batch. Signed-off bills export to Xero or MYOB, the payment run gets built there, and authorising it happens in your banking portal, under your credentials. That is a feature, not a gap, and it is exactly why delegating AP to a VA is safe here, but if you were imagining fully hands-off payments, that is not what this is.

The extraction is excellent on suppliers it knows and needs setting up on suppliers it does not. The first invoice from a brand-new supplier, especially one with an unusual layout or a scanned photocopy, takes human attention before the automation takes over. In hospitality, where supplier churn is constant, that setup work never fully ends. It shrinks; it does not disappear.

Price checking is only as honest as the price file behind it. If nobody loads and maintains your agreed prices, the feature has nothing to check against. Same with statement reconciliation: it matches what is inside Lightyear, so an invoice that never reached your Lightyear address is a human chase, not an automated catch.

And Lightyear is accounts payable and purchasing, full stop. It will not chase the money people owe you, it is not a stock-control system (goods received notes confirm what arrived, they are not a perpetual inventory), and it is not a ledger. The bank rec still happens in Xero or MYOB.

What stays with you

AP is where business money leaves the building, so the line is worth writing down. The VA does the operational work: processing, coding, routing, chasing, reconciling statements, prepping batches. The authority stays with you, and Lightyear’s per-user permissions make that a setting rather than a hope.

Payment authorisation never leaves your banking portal and your token. Approval sign-off above the dollar limits you set stays with you or your managers, and the VA’s own access is scoped below it. Any change to a supplier’s bank details, the single most common invoice-fraud play against Australian SMBs, gets flagged to you and verified by a phone call to a number you already had, never actioned off an email, however legitimate it looks. Decisions about disputing a supplier, switching one, or accepting a price rise are yours; the VA arms you with the variance log. And GST treatment policy and BAS sign-off stay with you and your accountant or bookkeeper. The VA keeps the data clean enough to trust; the judgement keeps your name on it.

What it costs and where to start

Lightyear AP work sits on the admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, and most placements run 10-15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month, with multi-entity groups at the top of that range and a single busy venue nearer the bottom. If you want the same person doing the full ledger side as well, bank reconciliation, month-end, BAS prep in Xero or MYOB, that prices as bookkeeping at $25-35, and we will tell you on the call which tier your actual workload is, not the one that sounds better.

Placement takes 7-10 business days, with 5-7 days supervised inside your Lightyear before any solo processing, because your coding rules, approval chains and supplier quirks are yours and nobody else’s. There is a $500 refundable deposit credited against your first month, a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. VAs are Manila-based working your business hours, which matters for AP more than most jobs: approvals get chased while your managers are awake, and the payment batch is on your desk before the bank’s cut-off, not after it.

The venue-wide picture is on the hospitality page, pharmacy owners should read the community pharmacy page, the accounts payable task page covers the workflow beyond any one tool, and the VA cost guide has the full pricing breakdown. Or book a discovery call with Jenn, who has placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024. Bring your weekly invoice count and how many entities you run. She will tell you straight whether a VA clears it or your coding rules need building first.