How Canstar centralised supplier contract management and prevented auto-renewals without review

Within months of implementing Gatekeeper, one of Australia's leading financial comparison services eliminated unwanted auto-renewals, achieved strong user adoption across the business, and redirected Legal, Finance and Executive team time to strategic work.

Canstar Pty Ltd is a leading financial services company in Australia, providing research and ratings and comparison services across sectors including insurance, banking, and energy.

The challenge: when fragmented systems create financial and regulatory risk

Canstar's contract management had evolved organically using Excel spreadsheets and ticketing systems. With the organisation's recent NetSuite implementation, the legal team recognised the need to centralise and automate Canstar’s contract management approach:

"There existed an ongoing present risk of contracts rolling over before the Legal and Finance team could review the contract with appropriate lead time" — Chelsea Simmons, Legal Counsel, Canstar Pty Ltd

• Financial Visibility: Finance relied on spreadsheets to determine committed spend. Contracts could be accessed, though visibility and ease of navigation was limited.
• Operational inefficiency: Each renewal required manual coordination across email threads and tickets. The contract owner lost time in having to coordinate written contract approvals across various teams (e.g. Finance and Legal) and the Legal team spent hours each week tracking down contract terms and chasing signatures.
• Difficulty in sourcing historical records: The organisation could not quickly source historical copies of all executed supplier contracts and contract approvals in one central place that all teams within the business could access.
• Strategic paralysis: Without systematic oversight, contracts with problematic auto-renewal clauses only surfaced at renewal.

The solution: unified platform with native NetSuite integration

Chelsea Simmons, Legal Counsel at Canstar, led the evaluation, shortlisting three contract management platforms. The decision criteria reflected the organisation's operational reality: eliminate fragmented systems, integrate seamlessly with NetSuite, and enable legal and finance to work from unified data.

Why Gatekeeper?

• Native NetSuite integration: Canstar's finance team had recently invested in NetSuite. Integration with NetSuite was a key requirement in the selection process. Gatekeeper addressed this need through its SuiteApp, enabling vendor synchronisation and providing contract visibility within NetSuite.
• Purpose-built for legal-finance collaboration: Alternative platforms tended to focus primarily on legal or on procurement. Gatekeeper's design allows both teams to reference the same supplier data.
• Modern, intuitive interface: For business users who would manage the contract approval and renewal process, interface design directly impacted adoption. The Legal and Finance teams find the Gatekeeper interface to be easy to navigate. Business users are now seamlessly submitting contracts for review and the automated workflow allows approvals to happen across various teams and Executive stakeholders with minimal manual effort.

Unified Contract Intelligence With NetSuite Integration

Gatekeeper gives Canstar a single platform to manage every contract from request through to renewal, with data flowing directly into NetSuite.

• Standardised workflows: Every contract follows consistent approval paths: executive approval → finance budget validation → optional security review → legal sign-off → e-signature → automatic NetSuite sync. No more email threads or manual status tracking.
• Centralised repository: All supplier contracts in a single system with complete audit trails and automated renewal notifications 90 days in advance.
• Seamless NetSuite integration: Gatekeeper's native SuiteApp delivered immediate value without custom development. Automatic synchronisation maintains a unified supplier list between both systems. Finance now has real-time visibility into committed contract spend and upcoming renewal obligations within their ERP. When Finance asks about contract terms or Legal needs spend data, both teams reference identical information.

"Implementing Gatekeeper was a great decision for our business and our Gatekeeper Implementation Consultant was excellent in helping us build out our workflows and realise value in the system quickly. We now have a central place where we can see every renewal coming up across the entire year, which means no more surprises, no more last-minute reviews, and no more accidental auto-renewals. That visibility alone has transformed how we manage our vendor relationships." — Chelsea Simmons, Legal Counsel, Canstar Pty Ltd

The results: measurable ROI and strategic transformation

• From reactive to proactive: Zero unwanted auto-renewals since go-live prevented wasted spend. All supplier contracts now flow through consistent review processes with plenty of lead time for review before the renewal deadline, enabling the team to evaluate vendor performance, renegotiate unfavourable terms, and terminate relationships that no longer serve business needs.

• From administration to strategy: Time previously spent on manual contract administration shifted to higher-value work. Executive dashboards now give leadership real-time visibility into upcoming renewals and vendor spend concentration, consolidating information that previously sat across multiple sources.

• From siloed to unified operations: Budget holders, Legal, and Finance all reference the same contract information, reducing duplicate requests and enabling faster approvals. Comprehensive audit trails demonstrate systematic third-party governance, positioning vendor management as a compliance strength.

• From visibility to intelligence:  With full visibility across the contract portfolio, the legal team identifies contract provisions requiring attention at renewal well before deadlines. Negotiations now happen with longer lead times, giving the team more options.

• From onboarding to adoption: Business users adopted the platform quickly, with new users reaching confidence on the platform quickly and independently.
  
  

"The proactive adoption from our business, which was enabled by our Implementation Consultant,  has quickly eliminated the need for manual tracking via spreadsheets, and has eliminated the risk of the business accessing siloed information. We now use Gatekeeper as a central point to manage all supplier contracts."
Caleb Payne, Lawyer, Canstar Pty Ltd