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Lightyear alternatives for price checks

Ultimo controllo 7 September 2026 · Questa pagina è disponibile in inglese.

Lightyear alternatives for price checks are either another AP platform or a service that does the check alone. Lightyear compares invoice lines with a CSV price list you load per supplier, on plans from £130 or $199 a month. If the price check is all you need, Price Double Check does it from a forwarded email, free to €79 monthly.

The question behind the search is usually narrower than the product. Lightyear is an accounts payable platform: it captures bills, routes them for approval, creates and matches purchase orders, reconciles supplier statements and exports coded bills to the accounting system. Its Price Checker is one feature among those. A purchaser who only wants to know whether this morning's invoice was billed at the price list price has two kinds of alternative: another AP platform with a price check inside it, or a service that does the price check alone. We are the second kind. Forward the supplier's price list and the invoice by email to one address and the reply comes back by email with the lines that differ, nothing installed, no list to load. Below is what each option needs and costs, as published on the vendors' own pages in September 2026.

What Lightyear's Price Checker does and what it needs

Lightyear's feature list describes it in one line: compare each line's product code with your supplier's agreed price list, flagging any that are overcharging you. The support article on setting it up says how the agreed price list gets there. You build a CSV per supplier with the product code, description, account, unit price without currency symbols, effective-from and effective-to dates, a tolerance per product, case quantity, POS code and unit type, and upload it. The product code must be exact, because the comparison is code to code, which is the right design. Tolerance is a percentage typed per line. When a bill is captured, the extracted landed unit cost is compared with the loaded price and the line shows red for overcharged, green for at or under the agreed price.

Three things follow from that design. The price list is yours to type and maintain: when the supplier sends a new list, someone rebuilds the CSV and reloads it, with new effective dates. The check runs inside Lightyear's capture flow, so the invoice must be in Lightyear, which means the bill is on its way to being coded and exported, and that export is what consumes a credit. And the pricing page does not say which plan includes the Price Checker; as of our check it is not published there, so ask before assuming it is in Essentials.

Lightyear plans, credits and prices by region

Lightyear prices by region, with separate pages for the UK, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and the rest of the world. The plans are the same three everywhere: Essentials, Standard and Professional. Essentials carries purchase orders, expense management, line data extraction, approval workflows and statement reconciliation; Standard adds goods received notes, three-way purchase order matching and inventory; Professional adds white labelling, single sign-on at extra charge and a dedicated account manager.

A credit is the unit of use. Lightyear's FAQ defines it: one exported bill, invoice, credit note or receipt with line items is one credit, consumed on export or archive; a supplier statement is one credit on receipt; a purchase order is one credit on creation; an employee expense report is three credits on export. Credits beyond the plan are charged on the next bill at the current per-credit rate, which the page does not print. There is a 30-day trial on a monthly rolling contract and an optional paid setup and onboarding package. On Capterra, where Lightyear holds 4.9 out of 5 from 193 reviews and 71 percent of reviewers are small businesses, the recurring reservations are that it is not cheap and that the initial setup takes learning; the praise is for support and time saved.

Four Lightyear alternatives for price checks, compared

Lightyear alternatives for price checks are compared here by the question each answers. Only two of the four compare an invoice line with an agreed price; the other two are strong at something else.

EzzyBills is the closest cousin to Lightyear's feature. Its Invoice Price Check workflow task, described in its user guide, lets you upload a list of item code, description and price, extracts the line items from each invoice and writes any price difference to the processing log on that invoice. It is an add-on step inside an OCR and approval product built for Xero and MYOB. EzzyBills publishes its plans on its own pricing page; the page would not open for us at the time of checking, so we do not repeat figures from third parties here.

ApprovalMax is the approvals specialist. Its Advanced plan adds bill-to-PO matching, which compares the bill with the purchase order raised inside ApprovalMax, and its pricing notification lists £39, £64 and £87 an organisation a month for Standard, Advanced and Premium in GBP, $54, $83 and $121 in USD, effective December 2025. From August 2026 the same plan names are sized Small, Medium or Large by the number of approvers and documents a month, and Capture, its OCR, is included rather than sold separately. What ApprovalMax does not have is a supplier price list: it checks that the bill equals what you ordered, which is the control described on our page on comparing a purchase order with an invoice, and it never asks whether the PO price was the list price.

Dext is capture. The US business plan is $25.21 a month billed annually for five users and 250 documents a month, and line-item extraction is an add-on from $20.50 a month or $0.50 a document. It gets the invoice into Xero or QuickBooks with the right supplier and account, and it is good at that; it does not compare a line to any price.

MarketMan is a restaurant inventory system. Its plans run $249, $299 and from $449 a month; Starter includes 50 AI-powered invoice scans a month and email invoice scanning appears only on Enterprise. Its Price Tracking and Alerts feature, in the vendor's words, lets you receive alerts and track changes to your inventory item prices. That is a check against what you paid last time, not against a list the supplier sent, and it presupposes the inventory items are set up. For a multi-site kitchen that wants recipe costing and ordering in one place it is the better buy; for a distributor with a supplier's price list in the inbox it is the wrong shape.

When Lightyear is the better choice

Lightyear wins when the price check is a side benefit of a process you are buying anyway. If bills need two levels of approval before anyone pays them, if purchase orders are raised and matched against goods received notes, if supplier statements are reconciled monthly and the coded bill has to land in Xero, QuickBooks Online, MYOB, NetSuite or Sage by two-way sync, that is a platform, and the £130 or $199 a month buys the platform. The same goes for ApprovalMax when approvals are the pain. We do none of those things: no approval, no coding, no posting, no payment, no delivery-note match, and we do not intend to.

• Choose Lightyear or ApprovalMax when the bill must be approved and posted from the same tool that checks it.
• Choose EzzyBills when you already run Xero or MYOB with it and can keep a price list uploaded per supplier.
• Choose MarketMan when you are a restaurant group and the need is inventory and recipe cost, with price drift as a by-product.
• Choose the email route when the need is the price check alone, today, on the documents already in the mailbox.

The price check alone, from a forwarded email

Every product in the table needs the price list loaded into it by hand, and only then checks the invoice. Our starting point is the other way round. The supplier already sent the price list as a PDF or spreadsheet, and the invoice as a PDF; both are in the purchaser's mailbox. You forward them to your personal address and the reply, by email, states what it read, confirms that the line sums equal the printed total to the cent before any line is compared, lists the lines billed at a price other than the list price with code, quantity, billed, expected and delta, marked in your favour or against you, and lists the lines it could not match with their amounts. Matching is by item code within a supplier, never by description; in the chain of real documents we validated on, 335 of 442 lines carried a description that did not match the price list wording, and the code still matched. A difference is shown, not judged: we do not rule on freight or units of measure.

The plans count documents: Free is 10 a month, Standard is 100 for €29, Pro is 500 for €79, and colleagues share one account on the paid plans. The reply per invoice is immediate once the price list is on file; a new price list against the previous one, and drift across invoices, arrive as a digest. If the supplier's list is a catalogue with suffixed codes or three versions of one invoice number, the reply says so, which is the point of returning an answer rather than a parse.

The fair summary of Lightyear alternatives for price checks: Lightyear checks prices as part of running payables, and does it well if you keep the CSV current. The standalone check, with no list to maintain, is what we sell; the way to compare is to try both on the same invoice. Our method is on the page on comparing an invoice with a price list.

Forward one invoice and the price list to your address and compare the reply with what any of the platforms above tells you about the same invoice.