Contract lifecycle management takes practice and standardization to extract the most value out of every deal. However, the majority of businesses and organizations experience some pretty common challenges when managing their contracts. Subpar contract management is the root of many avoidable bottlenecks and frustrations associated with managing modern contracts.
If you make any of the following mistakes in your contract lifecycle management approach, then you’ll set yourself up for a hard time moving forward.
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#1 Missing key dates and deadlines
Contracts include several critical dates and deadlines that can easily slip through the cracks if they’re improperly monitored. Tracking contract dates can be extremely difficult when there’s numerous other time-sensitive contract activities that need your immediate attention. Without a user-friendly, intuitive contract management system, you miss out on the opportunity to configure automated reminders to be shared and sent on a scheduled basis to your employees to keep everyone in the loop of approaching contract expiry dates and auto renewals.
Calendars are never a good option for managing your company’s key contract dates and deadlines, as these are prone to inaccuracies and human errors. Contract management software will support you with customizable reminders.
To learn more about automated reminders, click here.
#2 Storing contracts in a manual storage system
Storing contracts in a disjointed contract storage system only increases risk potential and the likelihood for misplacing and losing your contracts and associated documents. Instead of storing your contracts across shared drives, filing cabinets, email chains, desktops, local hard drives, and other poor storage methods, turn to a cloud-secure, searchable contract repository.
You won’t have to worry about backing-up your shared drives and hard drives, as everything will be kept up to date in the most current file versions within your digital contract repository. Accessing contracts is made easy thanks to the cloud, where authorized users can retrieve contracts from the software in any location, at any time, on any mobile device.
Electronic contract storage is essential to increasing the security of your contracts, and here at Dock, you can store all of your sensitive contract data within your Microsoft 365 tenant. This means you’ll never have to give access to your contract data to an outside vendor.
Read more about why manual contract management is a suboptimal approach to managing your company’s contracts.
#3 Lack of a contract manager
Perhaps one of the biggest pitfalls that companies run into when managing their contract portfolios is the lack of designation of roles and responsibilities with regards to company contracts.
We recommend assigning one contract manager to maintain responsibility over your contract deadlines, contract performance, and contract status updates. This person can ensure that contracts are in good standing when it comes time for negotiations, renewals, reviews, and approvals.
#4 Slow, complicated contract and data retrieval
If it takes too long to retrieve important contract information at the times you it most, then you’ll most certainly miss out on closing a deal or two. If your contracts are stored in a manual contract storage system as mentioned previously, then it becomes a time-consuming task to retrieve key data during negotiations, for example. A manual contract filing system might do the trick for a very, very small contract portfolio. But this doesn’t necessarily mean your contracts will be easy to find or even all that secure. Your digital contract repository works as a secure, searchable contract filing system that will increase the organization of your contract management while increasing ease and speed of access.
Your contract management system is equipped with text-based search and customizable, savable search filters that makes it incredibly seamless to locate common contract types. With a manual contract storage system, contracts are often located in a variety of places, which creates difficulties in accessing exact pieces of contract data (i.e., key dates and obligations), clauses, and contracts themselves.
To make it easy to find your contracts when you need, them then eliminate manual contract filing and storage. Leverage a digital, secure contract repository in your SharePoint for the fasted contract retrieval possible.
#5 Poor contract accessibility and lacking user-permissions
You have an important file that needs to stay secure and untouched.
But one of your employees deletes it.
Does this experience sound familiar?
Oftentimes, businesses and organizations forget to configure secure access controls based on roles and user-permissions. It’s critical that you access which users can access which documents within your repository. Many times, the necessity of permissions and accessibility controls is overlooked, leaving your contracts in the hands of those who shouldn’t have access to them.
Companies that use shared drives, electronic folders, and physical storage systems may find that delegating who can access, edit, and remove documents becomes a complex task. However, with permissions-based access controls, you can remove much of the tensions associated with this issue. You’ll reduce the likelihood of important files being accidentally deleted, which is a huge advantage. Contract management software also offers an additional amazing capability: the ability to restore deleted files.
Learn all about permission-based access controls here.
Read more about key security features within contract lifecycle management software here.
#6 Forgetting amendments
To cut down on forgotten amendments, we suggest storing amendments with their associated contracts. When preparing for a contract renegotiation, the last thing you want to happen is to find out that an amendment was previously changed – impacting the potential outcome of the renegotiation entirely. In an online contract management system, you can easily notate which amendments match with which contracts. This means that when you review your amendments, you’ll immediately see the master contract that is associated with a given amendment. In addition, when reviewing your master contracts, you’ll have all the signed amendments readily available to you.
Conclusion
Cut down on the contract mistakes and optimize your contract lifecycle management with Dock 365. Dock 365 offers a contact management solution built on your Microsoft 365 tenant, so you’ll never have to worry about sharing your sensitive contract data with an outside vendor.
With security features like user permissions, Single Sign-On (SSO), audit trails, and cloud storage, you’ll gain the confidence you need to simply productive contract lifecycle management.
Do you consistently forget about key dates and deadlines? Then configure automated reminders of your contract expiry dates and upcoming auto renewals with Dock so you can keep your agreements on the right track. This means you can prepare ahead and renegotiate so that you can get the best deals possible.
Ready to take the stress of your legal team’s back? Optimize and organize contract creation and management for your internal legal department with Dock 365 today.
Learn more about our Dock 365 Contract Management System here.
Learn more about Contract Lifecyle Management (CLM) Software here.
For more information, we would like to welcome you to schedule a free demo with us today.
