Every business deals with contracts. Regardless of the industry that you’re in, you have contracts with suppliers, manufacturers, staff, clients, and more. Contracts are extremely important legal documents and provide security around all the transactions and agreements you have. So, how are you currently managing your contracts?
Whether you have five contracts or 500, a reliable contract management system is essential to ensure that your contracts are safe and easily accessible. Contracts are not the easiest to manage, not to mention that they are confidential, so you need to take extra care with storing them.
Luckily, there is a contract lifecycle management software, which can help you automate contract management and has many advantages for your business.
1. Standardize the entire contract lifecycle
Standardizing how you deal with contracts from start to finish is essential to keeping them organized. Each contract should go through the exact same process, and contract lifecycle management software can help you do that. You can manage all your contracts from a centralized hub and track where they are in the cycle. It prevents you from missing steps, or deadlines and you can see precisely where each contract is at.
2. Time-efficiency
Typically, managing contracts requires a lot of time throughout the entire lifecycle. It’s a manual process that you need to stay on top of, which can take time away from other important business tasks. You need to create the contract, send it out, wait for approval, send out contract renewals as required, update contracts, and store them. Contract lifecycle management software automates all of the above, saving you a ton of time on manual tasks and boosting productivity.
3. Automates pre- and post-contract tasks
Before sending out a quote and after receiving approval, you need to take care of a variety of tasks. When specifically talking about client contracts, you need to determine the correct pricing based on the specific customer and their needs before sending them out. You also need to identify if the customer could qualify for discounts.
After the sale or contract is approved, you need to act based on the contract’s agreements. For example, if a client is signing up for a subscription, once the contract is approved and they’ve made their payments, you need to activate the subscription.
You can set up your contract lifecycle management software to automatically perform these actions. That means it can automatically quote clients based on your criteria and automate processes after receiving the approved contract.
4. Track all changes made to a contract
Contracts can change multiple times before becoming finalized. It can become very confusing and disorganized if you have multiples copies of the same draft, each with different information. It can even lead to the client signing the wrong contract or miscommunication between yourself and the client. Using a contract lifecycle management software, both the business and the client always have access to the most up-to-date contract. Both parties receive instant updates on any changes and can see exactly what was changed and when so that there is no confusion.