Better Manage Contract Risk and Compliance with CLM Software
By Justin Perkins, Solutions Engineer at Contract Logix
Here’s an all-too-common contract management scenario. Does it sound familiar?
I work for business A and I’ve just committed to a signed contract with your organization to provide a certain volume of (fill in the blank) products/services/etc. over the next year. I take that signed contract and toss it into a file cabinet or load it into some shared online folder like Dropbox or SharePoint.
Now, what did we as a business just agree to do again? It may sound like a straightforward question but it’s also the start to what can be a major problem with how you manage contract risk and compliance today. The good news is it’s easy to solve the issue and when properly addressed can have a meaningful and long-term impact on your business.
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Rather than storing your contracts in hard to manage file cabinets or shared folders, the key to solving this problem is a solution that provides you access to a core contract repository of key terms and all your contract details. You will always know the state of every agreement you are tracking, including dates, obligations, risk factors, associated revenue, etc. You’ll never miss an annual increase or contract renewal with real-time reporting and automated key date alerting.
Having the visibility into all these important contract details ensures you never take the unnecessary risk of missing a key opportunity or exposing the organization to a damaging liability. If you can’t track, view, search, and audit these obligations that you manage every day how will you make sure you are meeting those critical terms your business has agreed to meet? With manual contract management, it becomes an impractical task and with each new agreement signed it makes your ability to manage contract risk more difficult.
What if this same repository could also show you the critical details of the relationships you have with every organization your business works with? You can easily access and see the entire history of the relationship and track any key risk identifiers these relationships experience for future reference. All this information can also help influence and define your control and approval processes when certain circumstances are identified in the future. This holistic view of your contracts and counterparties gives you a trail to audit and track the compliance elements important to your operations. It also provides you the tools to track future trends across the business.
All these factors are key reasons for moving towards true contract lifecycle management (CLM) rather than a filing cabinet, excel spreadsheet, or SharePoint directory. None of those solutions can compare to what CLM software can do for your business. CLM software makes sure that at any time you have the decisive information to operate your business. From reporting to holistic views of your contract details to full-text searches across every piece of information captured and stored within the contract management database, including the text inside your documents, it’s all right at your fingertips.
Takeaway
At the end of the day, tools like intelligent contract management software from Contract Logix are meant to help you better manage contract risk and compliance. With contract management software, you can remove the worry of missing goals, milestones, and opportunities to better support your processes. You can speed up and manage accountability across your organization no matter how you like to view the details of these contracts or the relationships they are tied to. If you are accountable for something, always know what that item is and make sure the correct parties are notified at each point in the process. This is what Contract Logix can do for your business and has done for every one of our customers.
