Contract management is a complex process. You may constantly tweak your process — and your software — to keep your company growing. While these changes make sense in the moment, they could have real ramifications on the system’s whole performance. So regularly evaluate your legal contract management system to make sure it’s still the right fit for your business. You can use our guide here to take a deep dive into your system and make sure it aligns with your 2020 goals. But we recommend you also compare your system to an ideal contract management system. This can help you catch delays and malfunctions that slipped in over time. Consider these key elements.
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1. An ideal contract management system can be customized to your needs.
Your enterprise contract management system shouldn’t need clunky plugins to work with your existing apps and platforms. It also shouldn’t need you to add in extra steps in order to complete your contract management processes. Instead, it should flow smoothly with your existing system.
Can’t effectively use your current contract management software to handle your entire contract management workflow? Either your process or your contract management software may need a closer look.
2. An ideal contract management system monitors your contracts at every stage of the process.
You don’t just want your contract management system to keep an eye on your contracts as you’re creating them. Instead, you want your enterprise contract management system to monitor your contracts all the way through the obligations phase and into renewal. Your contract tracking system should:
- Call attention to compliance issues and make sure that your business maintains industry compliance.
- Let you know when contracts are about to be up for renewal so that you can get them signed and keep both your vendors and your clients satisfied.
- Track your contracts as they move through each stage so that you always know where they are.
- Maintain copies of both past and current versions of the contracts with a system that clearly shows which version of the contract is current. At the same time, it should also allow you to easily default back to past versions of the contracts.
- Sends out notifications when a contract hasn’t moved through the system for too long or when vital steps need to be taken.
3. It streamlines your contract management processes as much as possible.
Automated contract management can go a long way to keeping your system running smoothly and reducing the time your team has to spend on contracts. Also, it can reduce the amount of time it takes to move contracts through the approval process or to deal with client concerns. Your cloud contract management software should:
- Automatically score your contracts’ risk value at each stage of the process.
- Send out emails automatically, without requiring you to put them together from scratch.
- Offer templates that make it easier to put together contracts.
- Prevent salespeople or negotiation teams from submitting contracts that don’t meet your business’s minimum terms.
4. An ideal contract management system makes it easy to start and manage workflows.
With an ideal contract management system, you shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to start a new project or author a new contract. Ideally, you want to be able to open a new project and get started as quickly as possible. Your contract management system should provide templates that make it easy to put together new projects as well as a simple startup option that allows for the fast creation and use of new project elements. Business process management practices have routinely improved the profitability and stability of businesses.
Not only should your contract management system make it easy to start new workflows, but it should also make it easy to manage them. Team members should easily see what needs to be completed on any given project or process. An ideal contract management system will also offer reminders that will nudge team members and keep them on track.
5. It allows you to easily and effectively manage permissions.
Not every member of your team needs to have access to all of your contracts. But you do want every member of your team to be able to quickly and easily access all the information they need to handle their daily responsibilities. With an ideal contract management system, you can easily control user permissions.
Protect your enterprise contract management system by controlling which individuals have access to specific projects or workflows. If your company is growing or has a lot of turnover, you can create roles with permission sets instead of directly assigning access to specific individuals. Then you can govern what tasks can be completed by each level of user within your system.
6. An ideal contract management system offers simplicity.
Electronic signatures? Check.
Safe access from anywhere? Check.
You want a contract management system that offers an array of features. But you also want the ability to keep things simple. Everything from sharing and signing documents online to accessing your vital contract data from anywhere should be easy to do without a lot of clicks and delays.
When you’re looking for contract management software for your business, you want the ideal. That’s contract management software that actually makes it easier to track and manage your contracts. ContraxAware offers a platform that provides the features you need, with the notable customer support you deserve. Try it today to see how it measures up.
