Contract management solutions refer to the business procedures that handle the evaluation, creation, and implementation of contracts. This help enhance performance and reduce risk.
Contract management tools are essential for businesses – Contracts, being officially binding, governs a business’s shareholder relationships, warranty provisions, timelines for projects, pricing structures, the scope of work, rights and obligations, etc. Given how important contracts are, effective contract management dramatically improves the performance of the business. Likewise, if the contract management is shapeless, it leads the business to numerous financial and operational risks.
The role played by contract management solutions is also evolving. It’s not just filing documents any longer; contract management involves understanding every feature of the lifecycle of a contract to extract expressive data intuitions. As a result, businesses are very appealing, drive business performance, and know how to achieve their objectives.
What Are the Benefits of Contract Management Software?
Contract management solutions help you do more business with a better performance each time. The contract management system gives more understanding about contract’s effectiveness and helps take the right action to improve efficiency quickly.
Increased speed
By introducing contract creation into the contract management system, you won’t have to begin from square one every time you require to build the contract. In addition, as you enhance your contracts, you can update the terms and clauses across the entire system automatically rather than manually.
Better collaboration
A contract management solution lets collaborators make changes to a single document in real-time. This assures everyone is functioning from the same kind of contract and provides you with a greater ability to modify details.
Easy sharing
The location of the data is no longer a problem with a contract management system. Collaborators can easily access the contract via a link that provides them with the access to make changes in the document. However, e-signatures and other features are not easy to use and let contracts be accepted from anywhere.
Enhanced searchability
The contracts are text-searchable within your contract management, shortening research and letting you steer a huge volume of information with accuracy.
Top-tier security
In this era, all data includes sensitive information. Contract management solutions keep your agreements safe behind digital encoding and other cybersecurity rules.
Cloud-based storage
Even the digital version of contracts can get lost when saved on a simple hard drive. Therefore, the contract management system uses cloud-based storage so that your contracts never fall into the wrong hands.
Scalability
Success shouldn’t be a problem for any business. With a contract management tool, you can meet the demands of efficiency and speed that come by taking your business to the next level. As your business evolves, the contracts and the procedures around them will change. As new technologies develop, they bring new business opportunities and provide them with new compliance and legal requirements that you’ll want to abide by. Contract management software allows you to upgrade your protocols without anything going wrong.
Global reach
With the ability to approve and edit in real-time, you expand your business’s reach and build connections with vendors and suppliers worldwide. Signing a service agreement with clients and vendor worldwide is no more a problem than with a seller across town.
An endless contract repository
When you start your business, make sure that you work with thousands of contracts. A contract management system organizes and stores them all, keeping them from cluttering your space and procedures while keeping them available with just a few clicks.
Features You Get in Contract Management Software
The particular tools you require depend on various factors like the number of employees, the capacity of the business, and business type. However, here are some of the most vital contract management tools that all businesses must look for while looking for a new solution:
Effective search & reporting
Your contract management solutions are also going to help as the primary storehouse for all agreements across the organization, so an effective search tool is vital for letting various shareholders instantly locate and search the document.
One of the most significant search options is Optical Character Recognition, which makes all scanned documents completely searchable. This tool makes it easy to look for scanned documents comprising party names, expiration dates, legal clauses, etc. At the least, the contract management platform must have both OCR capabilities and an intuitive keyword search to ease the speed at which employees locate contracts or key clauses.
Customizable reporting is also vital. The way business leaders use the platform is different from legal or finance teams, along with insights that need to be naturally different. Look for a solution with customizable filtering and sorting capabilities or a customizable dashboard that help every team get quick access to the clause they need.
Alert settings
The alert setting is a significant advantage of to contract management solution. Alert settings remind your team about upcoming expiration dates and contract renewals so your team never miss the deadline. However, the software must communicate reminders efficiently. Calendar views help teams get ahead of any changes before the agreement expires. Some software only activates reminders in the platform, which can be overlooked by teams who do not frequently log in. An email reminder is a significant tool that makes sure no key contract dates are missed.
A central repository
The contract management solutions must serve as the single storage point for all permitted documents. A searchable central repository helps you access the documents from any location while keeping them safe and secure.
Sharing and role permissions
Not all employees require the same level of access to numerous documents, controls, and features. By limiting what some users can see, you are sure that different users can be only able to see what you want them to see.
Security
User permissions are one way to manage documents, but safeguarding your contract repository from hackers is equally significant. A cloud-based contract management solution is built on a reputable hosting environment. These hosting are well-equipped with security features like encryption, redundancy and virus detection.