It’s Time to Rethink Your Contract Cover Sheet
By Justin Perkins, Solutions Engineer at Contract Logix
Anyone using a manual approach to contract management is likely dealing with a burdensome process for tracking and vetting agreements. It’s not uncommon to see organizations still using paper vetting forms or a “contract cover sheet” that summarizes where the contract has been and who’s reviewed and approved it. This cover sheet then needs to make its way from desk to desk for wet signatures and approvals.
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Not only is this approach inefficient, it doesn’t address the final approval step of securing a signature from the counterparty. In today’s digital age, it’s unnecessary for anyone to deal with tracking down a piece of paper to manage a critical and time-sensitive business activity such as getting a contract created, reviewed, approved, and executed. Such an approach frequently raises questions like “who has the contract” or “is the contract cover sheet buried under that pile of papers on your desk?”
Nevertheless, many prospects ask us if our software supports a contract cover sheet or a contract summary sheet. After all, a contract cover sheet can help monitor compliance and track the progress of contracts in the process. The good news is we do but in a modern, digital, automated, and accurate way that provides complete visibility into every step of the process from request to third-party execution. No more paper pushing and trying to track down feedback and signatures the old-fashioned way.
With our contract management software, each contract record becomes a living breathing contract cover sheet of its own. It shows you all the critical details related to your contracts, business terms, and related documents as well as the entire history of who has and hasn’t approved the agreement you are referencing. You never have to hunt for, track down, or wonder where a contract is in your process. Our software instantly tells you the stage and status of every agreement with intuitive and color-coded progress bars.
With Contract Logix, you get real-time visibility into all your critical contract details without needing to reference a piece of paper. Our platform provides a live view of critical business items to anyone who needs to see them whenever they need to see them. And our contract workflow builder ensures your contracts are moving through the process according to your business rules. This helps increase compliance, keeps you audit-ready because it’s all reportable, and shortens your contract cycles because no manual intervention is required.
Having a digital and data-driven contract cover sheet allows for your contract management processes to be parallel, not just serial. Approvals can now happen at the same time, on the same record, and in different departments. For example, your finance and legal team might both need to give approvals on a new contract. With the paper contract cover sheet process, you have no choice but to pass the contract from one desk, perhaps finance, to the next desk, legal. With Contract Logix, both the finance and legal team can review and edit the contract simultaneously while tracking and approving changes.
Takeaway
It’s time to stop manually passing a paper contract cover sheet from one person or department to the next to track your contracts get them reviewed and approved. It’s time to embrace a digital, cloud-based contract management solution that lets you easily move contracts through your process in a more compliant and efficient manner. You can track real time information that matters to your business, have accountability for each step of your process, and shorten your contract cycles.
