Alice Alfano
5 Essential Contract Management Tools and Features
As companies work to beat out the competition, taking a deeper look into contract management can be a driving force of success. When contracts accidentally expire or key milestones are missed, it can handicap your business. Effective contract management improves workflow efficiency and leads to a more progressive and well-functioning organization.
The following 5 contract management tools and features can revolutionize the way your organization manages contracts.
What are CLM tools?
Thanks to technology there are several advancements in contract management choices that can give your company an edge. These tools transform manual processes and common workflow delays to ensure your contracts are organized, up to date, and easily accessible.
1. Central Contract Repository
Many companies have embraced the remote employment trend and have employees spread out across towns, states, and even countries. Without a digital storage tool both for commonly accessed documents and contracts, it is a time-consuming task to get a copy of needed paperwork.
Even if employees aren’t working remotely, relying on paper copies can easily lead to inefficiencies, disorganization, and a lack of document security. Manual approaches to contracts often involve lengthy email chains that can often take days to produce results as well as filing cabinets or share drives that require constant attention and oversight.
Manual methods make it difficult to maintain control over contracts, from a detailed awareness of key deliverables to contract compliance and the physical location of the agreement. A digital storage solution puts everything within easy, searchable access for all key stakeholders. One of the essentials of contract management is a simple and secure cloud-based repository for the organization of your contracts.
2. Automated Contract Workflow
For every business, time is money. When contract managers are tasked with manually trying to oversee contract workflow, it is a waste of both time and money. Manual oversight is often full of inefficiencies and fraught with error. Delays and mistakes can cost a company dearly.
Software that automates renewal alerts or task reminders can keep contact managers focused on things that are most important. Negotiations, collaboration, reporting, audit trails, and key dates or milestone alerts keep the manager on task.
3. Automated Document Assembly
When several individuals are in charge of both creating or reviewing and revising contracts, it can sabotage productivity. There is a lot of time wasted when employees repeatedly download and fill out templates, try to locate important information, create new files or documents and manually enter relevant data into dozens of fields.
After a period of time, some of the documents and templates become obsolete as new versions are created, yet without all personnel having access to the latest versions, the risk of error increases. This creates bigger problems with compliance, as there is no standard or current evaluation of approved language or practices.
Contract managers can save much-needed resources by moving past manual document processes. Using an intelligent document assembly software will streamline the contract creation process as well as centralize all relevant documents. Automation reduces compliance concerns and the likelihood of data entry errors, storage, security, and inefficient collaboration.
This automation is a tool that will bring each aspect of contract management into one easy-to-manage location. Version tracking, electronic signature, and export options increase the efficiency of your contract issue and approval processes.
4. Automated Contract Tracking
If your company handles a low number of contracts, it is possible to effectively handle your contract management needs and processes. As the volume increases to hundreds or thousands of contracts, however, failure rates increase and jeopardize company finances and partner/client relationships.
In addition to the financial burden, failing to properly track contracts can put the company at regulatory risk. Spreadsheets, emails, and filing cabinets increase the risk of losing contracts or maintaining records with outdated information.
Contract management software provides a more comprehensive and exact administration of the contract lifecycle. There is increased visibility from start to finish with each aspect of the process revealed through audit trails, notifications, and alerts. These tools improve contract-to-close rates, as contract managers can focus on potential problems before a delay is encountered.
5. eSignatures
Trying to obtain manual or in-person signatures from all necessary parties can be tiresome and difficult, and yet this is perhaps the most important part of contract management. It is hard to streamline the experience both internally and externally when employees are unavailable or schedules don’t align with meeting parties. Paper-based processes are antiquated and waste precious time.
With a software and contract management system that utilizes electronic signatures, stakeholders can sign when and where it is convenient. This reduces bottlenecks and delays in average send-to-sign times.
What Are the Options?
When it comes to CLM solutions, Malbek offers the best of the best. We are an industry leader providing organizations with CLM software that is easy to access, generates automatic event notifications and renewals, completely configurable with tracking, clause library, redlining, and electronic signatures.
Revolutionize your company’s approach to contract management and watch how Malbek reduces human errors and achieves contracting efficiencies. Request a demo today.
