How Contract Management Software Helps Scale Your Business

Contract management software helps scale your business in a multitude of ways. The most powerful way it helps to scale your business is in the staff hours it frees by reducing the tedious work of contract creation and management. Scalability is your company’s ability to handle increased market demand, and freeing your personnel from the time-consuming tasks of contract management is a necessity in today’s market. 

The complexity of contracts, as well as the exhaustive number of contracts managed by businesses of every size, can slow scalability. Contracts form the bedrock of a business, but if not handled correctly, they can also do irreparable damage. 

The entire lifecycle of a contract is critical for the agreement to be a success. Contracts spell out the terms each party has agreed to uphold, and both a company’s finances and reputation are on the line when a contract is breached. To further complicate the issue, there are often numerous contracts involved in one single business deal. 

The importance of contracts in scalability 

A company contracts to provide X number of widgets in six months, so there is a contract between the company and the customer. The company has to have supplies to build the widgets, so the company has five different vendor contracts that stipulate when and how many supplies will be delivered. 

Even in this rather simplistic scenario involving only six contracts, if one vendor misses the deadline to deliver their parts, it can cause a catastrophic domino effect. Contract management software helps prevent these scenarios by automatically generating alerts to approaching deadlines in contracts. Some contract management software, such as Evisort, can do this for third party contracts as well as contracts created in-house.

Direct ways that contract management software impact scalability:

Negotiations

Without contract management software, negotiations are time-consuming, and changes require back and forth communication between the parties and several revisions to a contract. With document management software, different parties can make changes to a contract in real-time. When satisfactory terms have been agreed on, the e-signature feature allows the completion of the agreement, all within a fraction of the time usually taken.

Revision tracking

a contract will most likely undergo several revisions before it is officially a signed agreement. Contract management software logs each of these revisions, who made them and when. Tracking the history of changes reduces confusion and increases communication. 

Risks management

contracts specify obligations from two or more parties. There are usually deadlines specified within the contract. Alerts of approaching deadlines, renewal notices, and even warnings of non-standard language in a contract are standard features of contract management software. These alerts lower the risk profile of each contract and increase the odds of successful completion of each agreement. 

Templates

all contract management software comes with pre-designed templates, and most offer the ability to customize templates specifically for your company. These templates reduce the amount of time spent on content creation while utilizing the most successful language. 

Contract management software, especially those using a cloud-based repository, increases the ease of collaboration. Effective collaboration directly impacts the ability to act quickly, and it is essential when contracts affect several parts of a business. Companies are increasingly doing business on a global scale and having a single repository for contracts, accessible from anywhere, means you can do business whenever and wherever the need arises. 

Collaboration and workflow management are essential in business growth. Tracking the workflow with software avoids bottlenecks and saves employees from doing redundant work. Workflow management can be designed in a way that best suits the needs of a particular company, and fosters teamwork among employees and between departments. 

Analytics

Analytics gives you instant access to the data contained in all the contracts in your repository. With a few keystrokes, personnel can determine the success of the entire contract, key enforcements, and what elements were successful and which fell short of the mark. The information gained from analytics can then be used to make smarter decisions about future contracts. 

There is a wealth of data contained in contracts that is useful for more than just creating better contracts. The information in contracts can help formulate sales plans, drive advertising, and do detailed costs analysis.