Contracts have long since replaced the handshake in business transactions. Along with a firm grip and determined eye contact, trust lives in a document. All business relationships and transactions reside within these contracts, determining whether business relationships thrive or suffer, ultimately affecting the entire company.
The key to contract management success lies in a contract lifecycle management system (CLM), a software that helps businesses track, author, create, approve, negotiate, sign and analyze contracts. The CLM software solution achieves this by automating processes, tracking deadlines and making data easy to access.
Contracts are living documents that affect the office each and every day. Here are 3 of the advantages top CLM software provides to empower your business.
1. Complete Visibility
- Cuts time tracking documents, verifying versions and compiling data
- Never send the wrong contract to the wrong person again
- Never miss a deadline like failing to secure all signatures
- Never lose track of documents
- With version control, see who modified your contract, what he modified and where
- Get alerts and reminders to meet deadlines
- Sort and filter contract data through a single dashboard
The sheer volume of work to track and manage data is overwhelming. But with CLM software, the workload gets reduced to minutes. Contract management software solutions include a dashboard that displays each contract’s ID, tracking number, status and expiration date. Plus, CLM gives you the ability to sort, filter and manage that data. Printing out an executive summary or a product breakdown is no problem. And with automatic alerts, you won’t miss any deadlines in the meantime.
2. Fast Contract Authoring
Results:
- No outdated language
- No time-consuming legal reviews
- Uniformity and better organization
- Library of approved clauses and terms
- Formats with popular authoring tools like Microsoft Word
- Contract types and templates
To begin a contract’s lifecycle, the document must first be born. To author a contract properly, it must use the latest, approved language. Many CLM systems include a library of contract language terms and approved clauses. Writing a contract can be simplified to a drag-and-drop process. Or, to make writing even easier, create a contract from a template.
3. Automated Approvals
- No bottlenecking and fewer delays
- Easily manage complex contract approvals
- Electronic signatures that work on mobile
- Dynamic, custom approval workflows
CLM software can provide dynamic approvals, which automatically checks multiple criteria for approval. The contract manager can tailor approval workflows for any contract, thereby getting rid of bottlenecking. A flexible electronic signature system makes the process even easier, allowing users to submit approvals and signatures through a mobile device.
While we uncovered 3 aspects that makes CLM software great for a business, many other features also empower the contract lifecycle. To research more about these features in contract software, visit Business-Software.com’s CLM resource page for additional articles and blog posts on CLM best practices. Or, you can download the Top 10 Contract Management report to learn pricing and key features of the best CLM solutions in the industry.