What Is the Best Contract Software Available?
Speed and agility have become synonymous with success in today’s business world. The efficiency with which you request, create, negotiate, and execute new business agreements has a major impact on your bottom line. And the way you manage those agreements after they’ve been executed is critical to managing risk. Effective contract management remains a critical challenge that modern technologies can help you solve.
Finding the best contract software for your business can be one of the primary differentiators in achieving growth and sustainable success in your organization. Modern solutions bring a host of benefits, including improved efficiency, speed, and accuracy when drafting, negotiating, and approving new agreements. They also play a major role in mitigating risk and supporting digital transformation strategies.
For companies that still rely on manual processing, this blog will help you understand what’s available on the market and where to start when choosing the best contract software for your business.
Why You Need the Best Contract Software in Your Business
In every industry, the effective management of contracts from conception to completion is how businesses survive and thrive in times of rapid change. Drafting a new agreement is just as important in a contract’s lifecycle as ensuring its successful execution, regardless of the time constraints involved. Successfully implementing a contract lifecycle management (CLM) system is one way you can achieve new efficiencies and match the rate of change in your commercial agreements.
Some major benefits of contract software are:
- Shortened drafting, negotiation, and approval cycles for every agreement
- Greater visibility into your CLM process for all stakeholders
- Reduced cost of compliance with company policies and industry regulations
- Adequate transfer and mitigation of risks by using available resources more effectively
Contract management software is a rapidly growing industry with plenty of solutions available. Organizations of all sizes and industries are adopting CLM software to digitally transform the way they manage legal agreements and play an active role in their company’s broader digital transformation initiatives.
Choosing the right contract management software for your business shouldn’t be taken lightly. Even with today’s sophisticated solutions, you’ll need to spend time modeling processes, building workflows, migrating existing data, and workshopping cross-functional involvement during the process to effectively onboard a system.
Matching your processes with a contract management system’s capabilities is the best approach to choosing a platform. You’ll need anytime and anywhere access that allows for remote work while ensuring you can archive documents and data for all contract-related business processes.
A cloud CLM system will ensure that your teams and stakeholders have secure access from any device, helping speed up the process and drive operational efficiencies. When evaluating contract management software, you should consider the following capabilities.
1. Automation and Integration Capabilities
Contract management needs input from different teams during every stage of the process. Automating specific contracting processes across different business units and ensuring project participation in controlled workflows helps speed up cycles and track team performance. It also ensures compliance with your business rules and mitigates the risk of missed obligations using automated alerts.
You can then integrate your contract management software with data from your CRM and ERP systems to generate accurate analytics and business intelligence across the company. Integration with your critical business systems allows teams to populate key fields in the contract automatically, saving even more time. You can assign resources easily, limit access to certain functions, and link related documents like schedules into your agreements from the central repository.
Automation and integration will speed up the process, improve control, and keep all stakeholders informed during every stage of a contract’s lifecycle. You can also draft accurate and compliant contracts quickly using request forms and clause and template libraries which allows you to respond to any emerging market opportunities with new agility. End-to-end automation and integration should feature high on your contract software’s checklist. The best contract software like Contract Logix’s makes automation and integration easy and quick to implement.
2. Provides Business Wide Visibility
Multiple stakeholders may have a vested interest in the successful execution and ongoing management of a contract. Internal customers may need an SLA to ensure availability, while vendors may need to monitor and report on their own performance.
Contract software should give you visibility into the signed agreement, the conditions involved, any records that support performance measurements, and all other documents related to compliance according to the terms of the contract. It can also provide real-time insight into the stage and status of every agreement in your process and who is responsible for each piece of it.
Contract management software solutions that are data-driven, like Contract Logix, also give you the power and flexibility to search and report on all language and other data points in all of your contracts and related documents which gives you and the team instant answers to important questions.
Providing better business visibility through your contract management systems will:
- Allow all your stakeholders to keep track of performance and progress
- Generate key analytics that your teams can use to make better business decisions
- Give unique insights into your contract management efficiency and identify bottlenecks in your process
- Help establish specific performance gates and verify all requirements were met before you release payments to your vendors or suppliers
Contract management software allows you to connect all your business teams and establish an effective model that reduces errors with increased visibility.
3. Versatile Enough to Support Any Contracting Model
Each company has subtle variations in the way they manage their contracts. These processes take years to develop and serve the nuances of the industry you operate in daily. The best contract software won’t force you into any kind of model, while being adaptable enough to support highly complex contracts that require expert oversight every step of the way.
Adapting the software to your process should be possible without needing expensive customizations or highly sought-after business analysts. You will want to choose a solution that allows you to implement your process by defining your roles, assigning responsibilities, and modeling your workflows without limitations.
Contract Logix facilitates all of this in a “no-code” fashion using drag-and-drop fields, visual workflow builders, custom objects, and other intuitive capabilities so that you can easily tailor the software to your specific needs without the need of a developer.
4. Centralized Control and Easy to Implement
None of the above considerations will mean much if you need specialized training to use the system and require multiple resources to configure and maintain it. You should look for a contract management system that is easy to implement and comes with centralized control. It should include the ability to store an unlimited amount of contracts and data in a secure and centralized repository, build a library of clauses, templates, and workflows with ease, and automatically create and trigger alerts and tasks to keep you on track and compliant.
The user interface should be intuitive while giving you complete control over how to manage different features, roles and users in the system. You’ll also want to control access rights on a granular level to maintain information security while allowing for collaboration from cross-functional business units and third parties. The ability to support concurrent negotiation and editing of a contract between parties without the need for email is critical in today’s digital economy. With capabilities like Contract Logix’s Collaboration Room you can enable frictionless and audit-ready contract collaboration and execution which speeds up your ability to finalize business. A system that is easy to implement but can accommodate your entire contract lifecycle management model is the ideal solution.
Versatile and Scalable Contract Management Software from ContractLogix
ContractLogix is a data-driven and cloud-enabled, fully-featured contract lifecycle management solution that provides you with complete flexibility and scalability. You can improve your information security, establish new collaboration capabilities, and build extensive template and clause libraries.
Our API allows you to integrate any of your CRM, ERP, or other LOB applications for maximum visibility into your business agreements. Every phase of your pre-execution, execution, and post-execution contract lifecycle management can be digitized, automated and streamlined using Contract Logix. Electronic signatures and real-time collaboration speed up the approval process, while you control the entire lifecycle with predefined workflow steps, approvals, and notifications or alerts.
For more information about ContractLogix and our contract software’s capabilities, request a demo.
