Still storing contracts in a shared drive or tracking them in a spreadsheet? If so, you're not alone. We know managing contracts manually can feel like a never-ending juggling act--one wrong move, and you risk missing deadlines or compliance issues. The thing is, contracts are the backbone of your business, and keeping them organized shouldn't be this hard. Imagine a world where everything is neatly stored, tracked, and updated in one place. That's where contract management software comes in.
Table of Contents:
- What Is Contract Management Software?
- The Benefits of Contract Management Software
- What Features Should You Look For?
- How To Choose the Right Software
- Contract Management Software FAQ
- Is Contract Management Software Right for Your Business?
- See for Yourself Why Customers Prefer ContractSafe
What Is Contract Management Software?
Contract management software is a digital solution that makes managing contracts easier and more efficient. It simplifies the entire lifecycle of a contract, from creation, negotiation to approval, signing, renewal, and ongoing management. Instead of dealing with the clutter of file folders or endless spreadsheets, this software centralizes everything in one place, keeping you organized and on track.
But it's not just about storing documents. With features like templates, approval workflows and AI-powered data extraction, contract management software helps streamline your processes, reduce risk and ensure compliance.
Let's break it down and explore who benefits from using this type of software solution.
Who Uses Contract Software?
Contract management software isn't just for your legal team. It's for everyone who deals with contracts. This includes teams responsible for fulfilling contract obligations, managing vendor relationships, tracking compliance and monitoring payments and renewals. In short, if your work involves any aspect of contract creation, execution or oversight, this software can make your life easier.
Here's how different departments can benefit:
- Sales teams: Close deals faster! Approval workflows and e-signatures speed up contract negotiations, so your sales reps can spend more time selling and less time chasing signatures.
- Procurement departments: Track contract milestones, monitor supplier performance and stay on top of deadlines with automated reminders.
- Legal teams: Streamline legal processes with features like standardized intake forms, templates and workflows allowing legal professionals to focus on higher-level work like case analysis and litigation strategies.
- Finance teams: Gain better visibility into contract value, make tracking payment terms and obligations easier than ever, spot cost-saving opportunities, and stay ahead of renewals.
- HR departments: Easily centralize and manage employee and independent contractor agreements, NDAs, and onboarding paperwork. Templates for standard contracts ensure consistency and save time, while user permissions keep sensitive files secure. Version control allows HR to track changes, ensuring everyone works from the latest version.
- Operations: Allows centralized access to key agreements, smooth processes and compliance by tracking key dates, obligations, and contract performance metrics.
- Business owners: Whether you're a small business juggling a growing number of contracts or an established enterprise, contract management keeps things organized and efficient.
The adaptability of contract management software means it will work for a wide range of industries, including:
- Education: Simplify the management of vendor contracts, teacher agreements, and grants with powerful search functionality and easy contract creation. Automated reminders for deadlines ensure timely renewals and compliance, reducing administrative burden and keeping contracts organized and in one place.
- Nonprofits: Maintain the high level of accountability and transparency donors expect by easily tracking funding and grant milestones, payments and obligations to ensure compliance with donor and grantor requirements. Create role-based dashboards for your team to access the specific contract insights they need.
- Healthcare: Stay compliant, break down communication silos, and keep documents secure and organized in a centralized document repository with customizable permissions and roles, version control, and audit trails. Automated alerts for renewal dates and compliance deadlines help healthcare teams stay on track..
- Hospitality: Tap into an organized repository of contracts across various locations and user-based dashboards sharing specific insights based on a specific user or property.
- Energy: Manage complex long-term agreements and intense supply chains easily, thanks to contract tracking and automated reminders.
- Small businesses: Scale your business with automated contract management and seamless integrations with e-signature and customer relationship management software.
Contract management software's adaptability makes it a powerful tool for almost every business.
The Benefits of Contract Management Software
Implementing a contract management solution like ContractSafe will deliver tangible benefits to your business:
- Eliminate bottlenecks: Automate approval workflows and speed up contract cycle.
- Find documents in seconds: No more sifting through folders or spreadsheets. Search and find what you need instantly.
- Never miss another deadline: Set up automated reminders for renewals, expirations and other key dates to keep you ahead of the game.
- Create custom reports: Get insights on contract performance with easy-to-create reports that keeps everyone in the loop.
- Organize and categorize effortlessly. Automatically categorize contracts by type to keep everything organized.
- Ensure Security: Audit trails, user roles and permissions and bank-level encryption keep your documents safe from prying eyes.
- Work from the Latest Version: Ensure everyone is working from the most up-to-date contract, reducing the chance of mistakes.
These are just a few of the ways contract management software can transform your business.
Streamlining processes, improving compliance, and reducing risk will free up valuable time and resources to focus on strategic initiatives. Now, let's explore the key features that make these benefits possible.
Key Features To Consider
Not all contract management software is created equal. Some are packed with features you may never use, while others offer barely enough to get by.
Here are some of the most important features to look out for:
Centralized Contract Repository
A centralized contract repository is the beating heart of your contract management system. It’s a secure, organized digital storage space with all your contracts, amendments, and related documents.
And it’s more than just a glorified filing cabinet.
A centralized repository eliminates scattered documents, keeps everything clean and tidy, ensures proper version control, and gives everyone involved easy access to the latest versions of contracts.
AI Organization and Categorization
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing contract management. AI-powered features can automatically organize and categorize your contracts based on their content, clauses, and key terms. This saves you time and effort, eliminates manual tagging, and ensures consistency in classifying your contracts.
AI can also help identify potential risks and opportunities within your contracts, providing valuable insights for negotiation and decision-making.
Automated Workflows
If you’ve ever had a contract sitting idle waiting for an approval or signature, you can understand the value of automated workflows. Automated workflows can guide contracts through approval and send notifications and reminders when stakeholders fall behind.
This feature is vital for speeding up contract cycles, slashing through bottlenecks, and ensuring that every “i” is dotted and every “t” is crossed.
Alerts and Notifications
Never miss a critical deadline again! Robust contract management software should have a comprehensive alert system to remind you of upcoming renewals, expirations, and other key dates. This means you should be able to set customized reminders for any contract-related event, choosing the timing and delivery method that works best for you, such as email or in-app notifications.
A calendar view can help your team visualize deadlines and milestones for easy tracking, allowing everyone to stay ahead of any changes well before an agreement expires or auto-renews. Automated email reminders are also essential for making sure that key contract dates are not missed, especially for those who might not consistently log in to the platform.
Powerful Search Functionality
Nothing is more frustrating than not finding what you need when needed. That’s why you need a contract management solution with advanced search functionality and optical character recognition (OCR) technology.
Sometimes, searching by file name or metadata isn’t enough. With OCR-powered search, you can find a clause or document quickly, regardless of its file type.
Your contract management platform should, at minimum, have OCR capabilities and an intuitive keyword search to facilitate the speed at which employees can locate contracts, key clauses, or problematic language.
Contract Tracking
Every contract management software has some kind of contract tracking and reporting, but many options are rigid, only showing you what they think you need to see.
Look for a contract management solution that allows you to customize your dashboards on a user level. That way, every team can see all the information that matters to them without the additional clutter that might not relate to their daily work.
Security and Compliance
Contracts are packed with sensitive information, and a leak could have huge implications for your business.
When looking for a contract management solution, make sure the system uses top-notch security, certified data centers, and bank-level encryption. You’ll also want to ensure your data is backed up for extra security.
Integrations
Depending on the size of your business, you may also depend on other third-party platforms as part of your contract lifecycle. Finding a solution compatible with your CRM, e-signing platform, or single sign-on solution is an important item to consider. You don’t want to implement a business solution that doesn’t fit into your ecosystem.
Sharing & Role Permissions
Not all employees will perform the same tasks or need the same level of access to various documents, controls, and features. User roles and permissions are one of the most important components of contract management software as they allow you to manage risk in a way that spreadsheets and shared drives do not. By restricting what certain users can see, you can be sure that different users can only see what you want them to see.
User-based permissions enable you to manage risk by ensuring only employees who need access to items or functions will have it. Read Only / No Delete permissions will give you the peace of mind that only employees with authority (attorneys, key managers, paralegals) can edit the contract record or remove contracts from the system.
Support
A dedicated support staff can work with your team through an initial integration, provide customized training sessions for your staff, and provide ongoing support in the event of any issues or bugs that pop up down the road. When making a significant investment in new software, having a top-of-the-line support staff will help your team get up to speed as quickly as possible.
How To Choose the Right Software
Choosing the right contract management software for your business can be tough. With so many options, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are a few things you should consider:
- Ease of use: Good contract lifecycle management (CLM) platforms are easy to learn. You should be able to find things easily, learn the platform quickly, and make changes at the snap of a finger — all while keeping your data secure and compliant with industry standards.
- Feature set: Contract management software should do exactly what users need it to do. Knowing what features you need will help you pick a platform that suits your needs without overpaying for bells and whistles you’ll never use.
- Implementation: Find software that makes the business-critical tools as easy to use as possible to spur adoption and get up and running quickly.
- Integration: Software should play nice with your current processes and other software essential to your business.
- Pricing model: CLM software is either pay-per-contract or pay-per-user. Most businesses prefer pay-per-contract since it provides more budget certainty and scales with your organization to accommodate user growth.
- Customer support: Evaluate the software's responsiveness and effectiveness in customer support and whether your team will have a dedicated success manager throughout the contract.
Contract Management Software FAQ
Here are some answers to the most frequently asked questions to help you make an informed decision when choosing a contract management solution.
How Much Is Contract Management Software?
Pricing for contract management software varies depending on factors like the features offered, deployment (cloud-based vs. on-premises), and the number of users.
You can typically expect a per-user, per-month subscription fee, or a pay-per-contract model. For small businesses with basic needs, affordable plans start at around $25 per user per month, while enterprise-level solutions with extensive features can exceed several thousand dollars per month.
What’s the Difference Between CRM and Contract Management?
Customer relationship management (CRM) software manages sales pipelines, customer interactions, and marketing activities. Contract management software handles every step of a contract's lifecycle, from creation to execution, storage, and renewal. While there can be overlaps and integration between the two, they serve distinct purposes within a business's software ecosystem.
Is CLM a CMS?
Contract lifecycle management (CLM) and contract management software are often used interchangeably. CLM refers to the overarching strategy and process of managing contracts, of which contract management software is a crucial component. Think of it this way: CLM is the “how,” and CMS is the tool that helps achieve it.
Is Contract Management Software Right for Your Business?
Contract management software can help businesses of any size manage the risk associated with the contract lifecycle; however, the best time to implement a new solution varies from business to business.
Generally speaking, if your company has reached a point of significant growth and contract volume is rapidly growing, it may be time to invest in contract management to help streamline the process. Also, if your current process is exposing you to risk, preventing your team from working collaboratively, or causing you to miss expiration dates, it may be time to consider an alternative solution.
Regardless of your business size, contracts are essential to your operations. As your business grows, so will your need for an effective contract management system. There is no shortage of solutions on the market, so finding one that fits your individual business needs is the key.
See for Yourself Why Customers Prefer ContractSafe
Are you drowning in contracts?
Losing track of key dates?
Struggling to find the information you need?
ContractSafe can help.
Our intuitive platform simplifies contract management, eliminates headaches, and frees up your time to focus on what matters most.
Schedule a demo today and discover how ContractSafe can transform your contract workflow.
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