Kirkland Lake Gold invest in AP Automation success with Redmap

KLG relied on Pronto Xi 750.2 – implemented and supported by Scope Systems – for their financials and uses Scope’s Purchase Requisition and Authorisation System (PRAS) extensively in the business. The majority of the KLG’s Purchase Orders raised are for non-stock services to the field, with some stock items for their stores. On any given month, the AP team processes around 3,000 invoices.

KLG was an early adopter of Redmap automation solutions, initially approaching them in 2015 to help them accomplish two goals.

Craig Reid, KLG Finance Manager at Fosterville Gold Mine, says, “We wanted to rid ourselves of the paper trail of invoices that were always piling up, and also to automate the PO matching of our invoices.”

Redmap designed and built KLG a fully customised solution from scratch.

As with all Redmap customers, the invoices and credit notes are received in the inbox, data extracted, checked for matches and routed to the appropriate resource. KLG use FIFO staff, as do most of the Mining Customers Redmap would later serve. But at the time this was unique and required customisation and a different solution design.

KLG approvers are responsible for marking themselves unavailable in PRAS and assigning a delegate to stand in for them when they’re rostered off-site or are on leave.

The delegate is responsible for authorising any PO that requires the original approver’s sign off but doesn’t have to be in the same authority mask. In this circumstance, the original approvers spend limit still applies.

To meet this requirement, Redmap further developed their PRAS integration to synchronise this data to their approval tables. Now, invoices allocated to the original approver are rerouted to the delegate (who inherits the same spend limit for those invoices only).

However, the invoices the stand-in would normally approve are still managed and validated against their existing spend limit.

Keen to make further efficiency gains, KLG upgraded their system to Redmap’s Best Practice for Pronto Xi in late 2020.

Pronto Best Practice (PBP) allows KLG to process both PO and non-PO invoices straight out of the box. Invoices are sent to an email address provided by Redmap for automated data extraction. The validated data determines if the invoice is posted directly to Pronto or sent to someone for their approval. Once posted, PBP generates a link to the source document so it can be easily downloaded if required.

The PRAS integration had also been further developed which increased productivity further.

Craig says the move to PBP meant his team no longer needs to manage the verification of the invoice data, saying, “…moving to a standardised platform not only gives me the opportunity to take advantage of new features in the solution, but also make support and on-going maintenance easier too.”

Redmap delivered to KLG’s goals of removing their reliance on paper and automating their PO matching – and the project deemed a success. But the benefits for the gold producer didn’t just stop there, says Craig.

“Fosterville Gold Mine was purchased by KLG in late 2016 and, given KLG is NYSE listed, this means that we are now subject to a Sarbanes Oxley audit each year."

While there are myriad elements to a Sarbanes Oxley audit, the overriding emphasis is on a business’s ability to demonstrate control over process. And that’s been a win-win for Redmap and KLG.