Contract management has never been easy. It’s a complex and demanding task and it’s even more so when you’re trying to do it the old-fashioned way.
It can take a long time just to manually copy and file hard copies of contracts, and it’s not cheap to store them, either. If you’re not able to easily keep track of prices, payments, and contract adherence, you could lose money, dissatisfy your clients, and even lose business.
With a digital contract management solution, you can standardize your contract creation process and manage your contracts efficiently throughout their lifecycles. It’s easier to create custom contracts, make sure that everyone is in compliance with the agreed-upon contract terms, monitor the success of your contracts, and even ensure that your team is working with the most up-to-date version of the contract available – all with just a few clicks. Here’s why your business needs to digitize contract management today.
1) Standardize Contract Lifecycle Management
Contracts are easier to manage when you have a deep understanding of their lifecycle. A typical contract lifecycle might look like this:
- Generate a quote
- E-sign the contract
- Make the sale and supply the goods
- Store your contract
- Renegotiate and renew the contract
In the old days, most of the work of following the actual contract terms would be done manually. Someone would be pulling that paper contract out of a drawer to verify the contract terms as needed. Not only is that time-consuming, but a lot can fall through the cracks. You can end up missing deadlines or losing track of discounts you fought hard for. When you use a digital contract lifecycle management tool, you can manage your contract throughout its lifecycle in a single application. That makes it so much easier to collaborate and keep track of contract provisions.
2) Customize Contracts More Easily
Contracts aren’t one-size-fits-all. They need to be tailored to meet the needs of the parties involved. Digital contract lifecycle management enables you to easily track changes to a contract draft. By giving you a level of transparency into contract draft creation that allows anyone, not just the person who wrote the draft, to see the important details at a glance. You’ll get notifications when changes are made, so you (or whoever is working with the document that day) can easily review them. All previous versions of the contract will be stored. Changes can be manually tracked so that everyone can easily stay on the same page. What a wonderful idea! Isn’t it?
3) Ensure Better Contract Compliance
It’s hard enough to make sure that compliance standard is kept; you don’t need to make it harder with manual compliance processes. It’s just too easy to overlook things when you’re trying to manage contracts with inadequate tools. A streamlined, digital contract management process ensures that contract terms are at the forefront and compliance standards are met from request to approval. This is marvelous indeed as for as accuracy is concerned.
4) Increase Contract Visibility
Storing all your contracts in a centralized, digital location simply makes it easier to achieve the contract visibility you need to make sure your team is working with the latest version of the contract. It’s easy to give access to your contracts to any member of your workforce that needs it. Contract templates and standard clauses can also be available in the contract management application. With full visibility into contract terms, it’s easy to ensure compliance.
5) Easily Track Contract Success
You need to keep track of how well each contract is moving through its lifecycle. Especially when it comes to your most-entered contracts. With features like audit trails in the central portal of a contract lifecycle management software, you can get one-click access to your contract’s entire history and make auditing for regulatory and internal compliance a breeze. Analytic features in your contract management software allow you to seek which parts of the process are taking too long and might need for reconfiguration. You might find that clients consistently want to re-write a specific part of your contracts, so that you should change your original contract draft to streamline that process. You can make changes to your contracts earlier in their lifecycle, which will help make them more successful overall.
6) Improve Commitment to Completion
You may increase the contract lifecycle completion rate by using authoring, review and approval phases of the digital contract management system applied to your business. Furthermore, through the use of this system, you will be able to capture signatures on the go using electronic signatures. So, none of your precious time will go wasted on getting the final sign-off. You just sign the agreement electronically and that’s all from your side. You are okay without the involvement of any papers whatsoever.
Digital contract management software is a real game changer for small businesses. Maintain the level of visibility you want in a contract, so you can keep a close eye on your agreements as they move through their lifecycle. Clients will appreciate your commitment to stellar contract management, and your business will thrive as a result.
