Contract Storage in Contract Management Software

The technological advancements in contract management software have made it possible to store contracts in a systematized way that allows for simplicity, organization, and easy searching and access.

Content-

• Common Challenges in Contract Storage
• How To Improve Your Company’s Approach to Contract Storage
• The Advantages of a Cloud-Based, Centralized Contract Repository
• Store Contracts Securely with Dock
• Conclusion

Today, organizations are leveraging these modern software solutions to optimize their contract management processes, leading to increased productivity. Many have made the transition to software after previously storing documents and contracts in physical files, emails, folders, boxes, and more. The traditional manual approach is outdated, risky, and bound to cause bottlenecks and a myriad of other issues. By storing contracts in an electronic contract repository, you can keep all of your organization’s data and contracts secure, as well as stay informed of deadlines easily. Not to mention, a secure centralized repository is key to having standardization, staying compliant, and maintaining version control. Improve your contract management system overall by making the transition to contract management software so you can secure store contracts in a centralized repository.

Common Challenges in Contract Storage

Does your organization face any of the following issues in contract storage? Let’s take a look at some of the most common challenges to effectively storing contracts.

Too Much Involvement

When you have multiple departments invested in overseeing contract management, oftentimes, accurately tracking both the status and the location of contracts can be very difficult. This creates disorganized and disconnected contract management, causing you to run the risk of missing critical deadlines like renewal and expiry dates for current legal agreements.

Lack of Visibility Leading to Miscommunication

A lack of visibility can be disastrous for any company. Without an appropriate level of visibility and transparency, it can be challenging for the right people to gain important contract information at the right time. When building new contracts, it can be helpful to refer to archived contracts to guide you during drafting. A contract management system that lacks visibility means that you can’t easily access and find how many contracts are active and what outstanding payments need to be made. Additionally, finding important due dates and controlling document versions can be unnecessarily tricky. Lacking visibility only increases the potential for miscommunications to occur.

Disorganization

Is your company growing at a rapid rate?

Are the contracts you’re consistently working with extraordinarily complex and full of highly specialized legal language?

Has managing a high volume of contracts become increasingly difficult?

In your fast-growing business, organization is key to efficient operations that help with maintaining steady growth. By effectively grouping and organizing contracts in a centralized repository, you can find exact clauses and documents with a quick, filtered search. Otherwise, traditional manual storage can take several times as long to locate a single contract. A user-friendly and intelligent contract management system will include a comprehensive contract repository, responsible for storing all of your company’s documents and data securely. Without one, you will not be fully prepared to scale your business’s contract management arm or to oversee milestones and due dates.

Outdated Storage Methods

By saying “outdated storage,” we specifically refer to manual processes of storing contracts and related documents that are found in past traditional methods of contract management. In this manual approach, a combination of sorting factors come into play. Consider a mixture of email, electronic files, physical paper copies, shared drives, server storage, spreadsheets, and much more.

Zero centralization, complete discombobulation.

How can any company have appropriate visibility or gain insights on critical data with such outdated methods? This only makes it more difficult to see what the status is of contract lifecycles and vendor activities.

Complicated Searching

Imagine spending 45 minutes searching for one, specific contract when you could spend 45 seconds by typing in a filtered search in your centralized contract repository. You can save customized filtered searches so you can find similar document types with ease day-to-day. Accessing several electronic contracts is incredibly simple, as well as reporting, tracking contract renewal and expiration dates, and locating various document versions. A manual contract storage approach does not have any of these time-efficient advantages, so it’s plain to see that a digital contract repository is the way to go to boost productivity.

Missed Deadlines

Without a centralized contract repository, you miss out on incredible features including automated notifications, alerts, and reminders of renewal and expiration dates. Built-in, filterable calendars make it easy for your organization’s departments to be on the same page when it comes to managing important dates for a high volume of contracts. In this way, you improve interorganizational communication and have a standardized, digital way of managing key dates, obligations, and milestones. Never miss a contract deadline again and streamline communication to maximize effectiveness.

Ineffective Management of Contract Data

Overseeing and properly maintaining high volumes of contract data is a challenging task. Doing so without degrading and slowing your system is especially difficult. Implementing a contract management system that allows your company to scale optimally and painlessly is key.

Poor Contract Tracking

Tracking, sharing, and storing contracts is vital to a successful contract management system. A powerful contract storage system will consist of a centralized repository that enables you to communicate with stakeholders and various departments about the status and location of active contracts. In this way, you can gain insights instantly rather than increase the propensity of bottlenecks or missed deadlines.

Does your current contract storage method include any of these situations? If so, don’t worry – there’s a solution. Your business can certainly manage and store contracts in a way that helps boost results and improve the overall quality and value of your contract management system.

How To Improve Your Company’s Approach to Contract Storage

A centralized contract repository is the key to storing contracts in an organized manner, while allowing your employees the ability to efficiently search for documents and gain insights on value pieces of contract data. For maximized security, a cloud-based contract repository is the way to go. In this way, you not only can organize your contracts by specific categories, but you can also enable user permissions-based access controls, maintain contract version control, conduct custom filtered searches monitor the location and status of contracts, and easily collaborate and communicate.

Contract management can drive a large portion of business, so understanding its impact on several metrics such as payment and financial details, compliance, risk management factors, profit margins, and other items is especially crucial. Help your contract management system drive results by increasing organization with a centralized repository. This leads to increased return on investment, decreased risk, and maximized productivity.

If your company still leans on manual methods of contract storage via physical copies, filing cabinets, email, shared drives, and spreadsheets among other things, it’s time to make the move to a digital repository so you can maintain competitiveness. Modernize your system and reap many time-saving benefits that will improve the risk management and security of your company’s sensitive data. To this end, your company also saves money on dealing with financial plunders that come with ineffective risk mitigation. Stay prepared and ahead at all times!

The Advantages of a Cloud-Based, Centralized Contract Repository

Manual contract storage methods reduce the accessibility, efficiency, and security of contract storage. Locating and retrieving exact documents or clauses can be a painstakingly lengthy process, and organization is vastly uncoordinated. A cloud-based, centralized contract repository supports the visibility, transparency, and tracking of contract statuses, renewal and expiration dates, approvals, obligations, milestones, and so much more.

With your digital contract repository, your company benefits exponentially by having a single source of truth for all contract management data. Organization of contracts becomes straightforward so that you can easily search, access, and share documents within minutes. This gives your company the advantage of increased accountability and control that simplifies all contract management processes from the software platform itself.

Store Contracts Securely with Dock

Here at Dock, our Contract Management System offers a solution to contract storage with a searchable, cloud-based centralized repository. Find data instantly and easily with complete visibility, contract lifecycle status updates, version control tools, and more.

Dock’s centralized contract repository can help your company increase contract collaboration and communication, improve standardization of contract generation, decrease the duration of contract lifecycles, boost productivity, gain transparency and visibility, mitigate risk, and improve the value of your contract management system overall for employees and clients.

Dock prioritizes contract storage by offering your company several modernized features, including the following three:

Optimized Visibility With Dashboards

Utilize detailed and comprehensive user dashboards that offer an overview of the most critical contract insights. Storing and managing contracts is easy with several reporting and data analytics tools, customizable email notifications, automated reminders and alerts, and ongoing contract tracking and monitoring.

Modernized Searching and Filtering Tools

Finding specific documents or exact clauses is simplified with keyword searches and customized filtered searches. Sort data by categories like department or contract type to easily locate information. Configuring metadata according to important information is both easy and possible with Dock.

Increased Security

Designing privileges, security levels, and permissions-based access for users is quick and painless with Dock’s centralized repository. Select rules based on roles or employees and enable access to certain files to keep tabs on contract redlining and version control.

Conclusion

Never lose a contract or miss a deadline ever again. Master powerful contract management with a different approach offered by our contract management system.

Completely overhaul your contract management system for the better by transitioning to a centralized, cloud-based contract repository for storing all of your company’s sensitive contract data. Boost results, increase productivity, maximize security, improve compliance, maintain visibility, and effectively track contracts with the help of Dock 365. Our intelligent contract management system can help your business powerfully produce and store contracts in a way that meets your unique business needs and objectives so you can properly scale for the long run.

Here at Dock, we are experts in SharePoint and Office 365 and want to help business utilize their features to revolutionize and streamline contract management. Our Contract Management System is equipped with several amazing features that will help improve the quality of your contract management processes with the help of a SharePoint and Office 365-based collaborative software interface. Improve business dealings, increase contract compliance, reduce bottlenecks and turnaround times, enhance risk mitigation efforts, and completely overhaul contract management team productivity for the better with our contract management software.

Ready to get started today? Reach out to us to learn more about our  Dock 365 Contract Management System.

If you would like more information, we welcome you to schedule a free demo with us today.