Data integrity is critical to every process in your business, including your contract management software. You want to ensure that the correct data gets shared with your customers and used across your organization. As you move into 2020, you may have committed to improving your business’s overall data integrity. Alternatively, that might be a standing goal for your business. If you’re migrating over to a new system, ensuring data integrity could be even more critical during that transition. With these key reports, you can test your contract system’s data integrity and ensure that you have the right information on hand. We recommend you create them as one step of evaluating your contract management system for 2020. Then schedule automated report generation on a weekly or monthly basis.
The top five reports that can help your company improve contract data integrity are:
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1. Data Duplication Reports
Your enterprise contract management software may have its own internal data duplication report. If you use a Windows-based server, its Data Deduplication tool can also be used to identify any redundant or duplicate data located within your system and clean it up. When possible, try to manually check data duplication to ensure that you do not mistakenly delete data that you might need in the future. Automated tools, however, can speed up the process and allow you a better glimpse of your system’s overall data integrity.
2. Error Checking and Data Integrity Reports
In order to determine the security and integrity of your data collection system, you may need to run an error checking report. These reports may create blank or default data values. Then they check to ensure that the system can retrieve the data without error.
You may also want to attempt to retrieve specific values or information from your contract system manually. This ensures that you’re able to accurately collect and retrieve the information you need for your daily processes. It’s better to catch errors and bugs early than wait until large sections of data are corrupted.
3. Security Reports
If you find your business suffering a malware attack, check everything. Your data integrity may be compromised, along with other vital parts of your system. Ransomware can lock you out of your data. This is a situation that can be remedied with effective, off-site backups kept separate from your primary data storage. But other types of malware may attempt to steal or overwrite your existing data with new, false data.
Your security reports, therefore, are critical for checking over your data integrity. If you notice problems with your organization’s security, you may need to perform new scans and tests to validate your contract tracking system’s data integrity better.
4. Audit Trails
When your database is running smoothly, you may not think much about it. When you discover a problem, however, an audit trail report can prove invaluable to tracing back the issue to its source. You want enterprise contract management software that will save each copy of a contract or document uploaded to the system. This allows your team to more easily look back over past versions of the document. With these records, you can easily check to see how inaccurate information appeared in the system.
Did someone mistakenly duplicate a document instead of saving a new copy as the next step in the process? Did a negotiator put in incorrect terms or fail to include a clause the customer needed in the contract?
By creating a clear audit trail, you can more easily determine the source of a problem. You’ll know exactly where in a contract’s lifecycle a data error occurred, which means you can more easily fix it. In many cases, you can also prevent it from happening in the future.
5. Backup Files
If your organization is hit with a ransomware attack, suffers a data breach, or loses access to its physical systems, do you have a backup system in place to preserve your data integrity?
Ideally, you want well-organized backup files that you can easily access from a location away from your physical office. In the case of a natural disaster, this practice lets you continue to operate even if the disaster interferes with your ability to access the premises. Your enterprise contract management software should also periodically check your backup files for data integrity. If a disaster does occur, then you can easily access current information on your contracts and your clients.
Determining the data integrity of your contract management systems, and the rest of your business, takes a substantial amount of time and energy. Fortunately, if you’re using a smart contract management system, the system can do it for you! Enterprise contract management software can:
- Automatically run vital data integrity reports.
- Email those reports to the individual responsible for checking them or signing off on them.
- Require essential fields as team members create records.
- Check fields for data conflicts during record submission.
While enterprise contract management software can’t solve all your data integrity problems, it can substantially increase the likelihood that you will have the right information at hand at any given time. By choosing the right CLM software, you can set your business up for success when it comes to data integrity. These precautions streamline the process of verifying data. Letting your system automatically review input data also prevents future problems. Learn more about how ContraxAware can help protect your data integrity and your contract records by scheduling a 1:1 demo with our team.
