Contract management software helps organizations of all sizes to create, store, track, and manage contracts throughout the entirety of the contract lifecycle. With leading contract management software, users can draft contracts and documents, define terms and conditions, assign tasks and permissions, and track crucial milestones.
A user-friendly and well-organized contract management platform helps organizations to optimize their contract lifecycle process, allowing them to strengthen and improve their relationships with vendors, customers, and suppliers as their contract volume and complexity increases. Key contract management software features include:
Contract management software can support organizations in all their source-to-contract needs, allowing for improved efficiency and productivity, organized and secure storage, mitigated risk, and increased revenue.
A variety of roles can enrich their organization’s particular source-to-contract needs with user-friendly and dynamic contract management software.
Contract managers can navigate the ever-shifting landscape of contract management best practices with a solution that offers:
Legal professionals can overcome their most significant challenges because:
Procurement professionals can cut risk, standardize and organize their organization’s purchasing process, and maximize the value of their purchasing opportunities with eProcurement features including:
Sales professionals can take control of their sales practices, cut contract cycles, increase compliance, mitigate risk, and find more opportunities for the contracts they manage with tools such as:
Compliance professionals can fulfill the terms of a contract, meet obligations in a timely manner, evade bottlenecks, reduce risk, increase revenue, and maintain a trustworthy reputation with:
The contract lifecycle is the process through which a contract undergoes requests, authoring, negotiations, approvals, signatures, execution, and close-out or renewal. The full lifecycle process can be seen in the graphic below.
Organizations are tasked with juggling many contract records, and each contract is likely at a different phase of the lifecycle. Thus, contract lifecycle management is crucial in reducing risk, improving productivity, and maximizing a contract’s value. Here is how contract lifecycle management software can help:
Dated contract lifecycle management solutions leave the potential for detrimental bottlenecks, missed tasks, and legal consequences. Such is the value of sufficient contract lifecycle management software. A configurable and easy-to-grasp contract lifecycle management interface gives all parties access to advantageous features in or out of the office so that they can breeze through the contract process without issue.
Without contract management software, documents are stored in filing cabinets for paper documentation, disorganized digital storage locations, and emails. Organizations may miss out on version control tools, key date and milestone alerts, searching and reporting functionality, and overall contract performance improvement.
Such methods limit document access, leave documents and their supporting files disconnected, lack transparency and visibility, and lack support for the proactive management and tracking of contract status, approvals, renewal dates, automated renewal clauses, and milestones.
On the flip side, a secure contract and document repository system proffered by contract management software optimizes and secures the protection, organization, location, and sharing of contracts. Data protection features make it so that PII is not at risk. A secure repository system centralizes document version control, improves organizational accountability, and increases productivity.
Proper contract storage provides an opportunity for organizations to make contracts work for them, which leads to simpler contract management, increased revenue and savings, reduced risk, and success in meeting contract management KPIs.
Organizations can use workflows to track every stage of the contract lifecycle with collaboration, negotiation, and approval tools. Automatic alerts help with meeting key dates and milestones, including contract renewals. Moreover, audit trail history tracked by intelligent contract management software provides an easily-accessible, current record of contract changes. Organizations can streamline contract approval cycles by avoiding bottlenecks and promoting accountability with automated workflow.
Software that offers contract workflow automation can reduce delays in the contract lifecycle by informing the correct people at the right time with unlimited notifications, task reminders, and automated alerts. With intelligent workflow, organizations can leverage:
With an automated document assembly feature included with contract management software, organizations can enforce compliance and eradicate issues regarding collaboration, distribution, storage, and data entry.
Legal document assembly software helps organizations to produce accurate, compliant, and timely letters, documents, and contracts that merge their pre-approved data fields and clauses. This feature allows for the management of document versions and templates that can be exported easily into standard file formats. MS Word plug-ins make drafting and review more time-efficient. Tools for version tracking keep the document drafting process consistent. E-signatures make signing fast, easy, and accessible in or out of the office.
Regarding the reduction of compliance bottlenecks, legal document automation features allow configuration of user permissions and rules regarding version access and document management with approval routing capabilities and audit trails.
Cutting-edge contract management software is instrumental in the tracking of documents, tasks, and compliance because it provides features such as:
Additionally, intelligent workflow makes task tracking simpler and more organized. User-defined fields make for a consistent and navigable contract creation and searching experience. Software that provides enhanced contract tracking tools is crucial in evolving your organization’s standards and processes for success.
Advanced contract management software catalogs all text-based files that are input into the system, making them searchable. Additionally, enhanced features such as in-line OCR tools can convert scanned PDF files into text-based files for user-friendly indexing and searching.
Quick search tools offer a simple way for users to find pertinent contract record information quickly. Searching for a keyword shows the user all results in the system containing that word. Users can further narrow results to meet their needs. For example, I could type in the keyword “software” to hone in on contracts containing that keyword, and further filter my results to only display expired contracts.
Simple search tools aid in specificity when a user is engaging in a one-off search. Rather than searching through all of their fields and files within the software, users can select a specific field to search in. For example, if a user is looking for a contract associated with a counterparty (we will call it XYZ Supplier), they would select the counterparty, and the results would only show contracts assigned to XYZ Supplier.
Ad-hoc query tools and custom report builders allow organizations to save reports and assign users to view them, export and save reports to a variety of data formats, and standardize their reporting system.
These searching and reporting features organize and standardize the search process and save organizations time.
Creditable contract management software vendors offer a variety of options to assist users in their needs and offer best practices, including:
This abundance of tools is instrumental in helping organizations to maximize their investment, improve their efficiency and productivity, and fully leverage their contract lifecycle management platform.
Yes! Trusted contract management software solutions offer comprehensive and targeted demos and trials with software experts to help you choose the right software for your organization’s contract management needs.
Now that you have the answers to the most common questions regarding contract management software, you know the value of navigating the contract lifecycle with the support of a tried-and-true source-to-contract suite.
CobbleStone's Contract Management Software, Contract Insight®, is relied upon by thousands of contract, legal, risk, and sales professionals worldwide. Request a demo of our award-winning contract management, eSourcing, & procurement platform today!