Why Your Organization Should Be Using Contract Management Software Today
Contract managers, finance, legal, and sales teams are often tasked with implementing new software systems to increase efficiencies and reduce costs. Contract Management Software is often a solution that is up for consideration across all of these business groups. Before determining if contract management software is the right solution for your organization, the bigger question to consider is, why is contract management software so important? And, why should my organization be using it?
Effective contract management is essential to the success of any business. Contract management software can provide numerous benefits that save time and money while reducing errors and increasing productivity. By streamlining the contract process, improving collaboration, providing enhanced visibility, standardizing contracts, centralizing document management, and improving compliance, businesses can reduce the time and effort it takes to manage contracts while reducing the risk of errors and legal disputes.
Let's go into more detail on these six ways that contract management software can improve your business by saving you time and money.
1. Streamlining the Contract Process
Contract management software can help streamline the contract process by automating tasks such as contract creation, review, and approval. This eliminates the need for manual processes, which can be time-consuming and error-prone. With automation, businesses can reduce the time it takes to complete a contract and reduce the risk of errors that can lead to costly legal disputes. Three best practices for using contract management software to automate workflows include:
- Automated alerts and notifications can help users to stay on top of progress in deal-making and also allow them to review changes to the status of negotiations and key documents when they occur (or do not occur by a set time or date). Further, notifications may detail upcoming or missed deadlines as well as changes to scheduling.
- Pushing contracts through for changes, approvals, and review: contract management software can automate this phase of the contract management lifecycle. If a clause changes, for example, a notification pings the party who must then review it within a certain time frame.
- Routing contracts for signature: contract management software can route the contract for wet or electronic signature. This speeds up the formalities of contract conclusion. And in turn, this sets in motion the contract implementation, monitoring, and management activities.
2. Improved Collaboration
Contract management software can provide a secure, centralized platform and repository for all stakeholders to collaborate on contract development, negotiation, and execution. This ensures that everyone involved in the contract process has access to the latest information, reducing the need for email exchanges, and improving communication. This can save time and money by reducing the need for multiple meetings and discussions. In addition, contract management software can provide enhanced collaborations with your CRM applications such as Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce. Your sales team can initiate contracts, locate and link data, and pre-populate forms in the CRM applications they use every day.
3. Enhanced Visibility
Contract management software provides enhanced visibility into the contract lifecycle. This includes tracking contract status, deadlines, and milestones. This increased visibility helps businesses stay on top of their contracts and ensure that they are meeting their obligations. It can also reduce the risk of missed deadlines and penalties. More robust software can even configure alerts and notifications to track important events by contract, contract type, user, or role—using pre-defined schedules or to notify users when issues arise.
4. Standardization
Contract management software can provide the ability to standardize contracts, including templates and clauses. This can reduce the time and effort it takes to create new contracts and ensure that contracts are consistent across the organization. For example, Contracts 365 has an easy-to-use wizard that lets you create a variety of contract types, with contract playbooks and clause libraries to help customize agreements based on specific contract types. This can also reduce the risk of errors and inconsistencies that can lead to legal disputes.
5. Secure and Centralized Document Management
The best contract management software should provide a secure, centralized, and cloud-based repository for all contract-related documents. This eliminates the need for manual document management, reducing the risk of lost or misplaced documents. With all documents in one place, businesses can easily access and retrieve documents, reducing the time it takes to find the information they need. Contracts 365, built for businesses that run on Microsoft 365, leverages your existing Microsoft 365 tenant as a contract repository and your Microsoft cloud architecture as a platform, ensuring an unprecedented level of security while retaining complete control of your documents and data.
6. Improved Compliance
Contract management software can help ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and internal policies. This includes tracking key contract terms and conditions, ensuring that they are being met. For example, contract-specific obligations can be extracted and associated with the contract, and then incorporated into future workflows, and reports. This can reduce the risk of non-compliance and the resulting penalties and legal disputes. For example, look no further than this case of an unmet contractual obligation costing $100 million in questionable costs. In addition, auto expiration and renewal notification can automatically notify internal stakeholders and counterparties of expirations, renewals, or required actions to keep contracts compliant, enforceable, and up to date.
In conclusion, contract management software can provide numerous benefits that save time and money while reducing errors and increasing productivity. If your business runs on contracts, then a contract management software solution could be right for you. If you’d like to learn more about our Contract Management Software for businesses that run Microsoft 365, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us or, even better, request a demo and we can show you how it works in real-time.