Considering that almost every business operates through contracts, a company should integrate a contract management system into its business processes. Before settling for a contract management solution such as ContractSafe.com, you need to understand the mechanisms of how to utilize the software, failure to which may lead to challenges with security, workflow, and management.
Are you aware that over 90% of organizations have challenges in finding their contracts? A survey by Ernst & Young revealed that 92% of organizations are changing methods of handling contract agreements, whereas 60% are committed to implementing workflow changes. However, 99% of companies have no statistics or technology needed to better their contracting processes, creating a gap between planning and efficiency.
To maximize contract management functionality, several critical factors in implementing will significantly improve your business’s contract management operations.
- Automation
Manually conducting contract management processes is tedious, slow, and leads to human error and oversight, presenting a risk to the business. Human is to err, and a contract manager may overlook a section while reviewing or authorizing a contract. For this reason, you need a contract management solution to automate your workflows and make sure teams keenly follow every set rule for contract agreement, requirements, and approvals, to eliminate oversights.
By integrating automation in contract processes, you can efficiently track contracts, allocate tasks, send requests and reminders to appropriate parties in an organized manner. Automation simplifies the process while minimizing risk and inefficiency at every contract stage.
2. Secure your contract data
The nature of a contract mainly presents the need of having several people working on it, which may be risky if contract copies are scattered everywhere – in drives, emails, or a filing cabinet. Regardless of the storage location, having your contracts all over is risky for your company.
That is why you need contract management software to centralize all your contract agreement information in a single cloud-based secure location.
Benefits of centralizing contract in a cloud-based repository
· Security – With its flexible functionality, the contract management system can regulate access to sensitive contract information with encryption, authentication, and role-based and feature-based permissions.
· Searchability – a contract management system enables easy and quick exploration of keywords, phrases, legal terms, and other crucial information related to contracts. From your computer, you can do a quick search or make an essential reference during a meeting or while drafting a contract document.
· Accessibility – since all your contracts and related information is accessible in one place on the cloud, everyone with permission rights can access it from any location and any device.
· Analyze data – A contract management solution saves data that you can filter, categorize, analyze and make reference to whenever the need arises. You can label information by any format, including organization, contract type, individual’s name, and any other format type as per your preference. It is also possible for you to generate reports to track key performance indicators to help you improve on weak areas.
3. Enhance contract tracking using alerts
Eliminate oversights and missed dates and obligations by using alerts and notifications. Tracking and recalling key dates, milestones, and responsibilities associated with a contract can become overwhelming, especially with multiple contracts. Missing dates may pose a considerable challenge and insurmountable risk to any organization. That is why leveraging software settings to create alerts is a beneficial way to manage your contracts.
A contract management software solution allows you to automate alerts and set alarms for notifications to remind you of approaching due dates for contract renewal, terminations, or any obligations. You can automate that information, clearly stating the time frame, dates and setting the milestones.
4. Leverage the use of templates
To maximize the benefits of using a contract management software solution, capitalize on the templates available in the libraries by editing and customizing them to your preferences. By modifying templates, all your standardized and ratified legal language and formats are centralized and accessible by every interested party.
Additionally, you can strategize and plan how to assemble your contracts using specific clauses and templates available in the library. Planning lets you create negotiation-ready contract agreements quickly using updated versions that you and your team have previously talked over and rewritten. Besides that, you always use the latest formats and correct language in your contract agreements after correcting all errors and unforeseen oversights.
Contract management software helps you to increase efficiency and minimize time spent creating contracts.
Conclusion
Obtaining contract management software is a crucial factor to consider if you have an efficient and effective step-by-step contract management process. However, to leverage the benefits of a contract management system, it is essential to understand each functionality to utilize them to the maximum and reap all its benefits. Also, ensure that you identify features for security, accessibility, storage, clauses, automation, alerts, workflows, and templates available in libraries.
For maximum benefits, familiarize yourself with the contract management software and learn more about the onboarding process, dashboard features, and accessibility to a centralized repository. Additionally, make sure you understand the benefits and shortcomings of each specific contract management software before making a purchase.
