For the Uninitiated, Contract Tracking
Contract management is a dynamic process that necessitates strategy at every stage of the contract lifecycle, from contract inception to contract renewal or expiration. It's usual for contracts and related documentation to be saved and forgotten about after they've been signed and completed, only to be discovered when a problem develops or the contract expires. Contract managers and administrators must emphasise the need of continuing agreement administration to guarantee that deliverables and commitments are met. With the help of a contract tracking tool, you can do this.
Your ability to gain new contract prospects and transactions may be hampered by insufficient contract management software. Consider adopting a risk-averse, compliance-conscious, and collaboration-friendly solution capable of pushing contract management success rather than settling for a system that creates inefficiencies and bottlenecks.
The subject of today's discussion is contract tracking and monitoring in general. We'll go through how contract repositories can assist you with these duties, as well as which contract data to use for KPI assessments and how to make the most of your monitoring tools.
Contract Tracking and Monitoring Best Practices
- Make use of a centralised contract repository.
With a digitised, centralised repository, you can quickly prepare contract draughts using preapproved contract templates and stipulations. As a consequence, proper, compliant contracts are written quickly. Using a digital repository to combine all of your contracts provides your team with an organised, single source of truth for contract location. Your team can rapidly identify regularly used contract types in your repository by using powerful text-based searches and configurable filters. This can help you prevent delays in finding important contracts when you need them the most, such during negotiations or evaluations.
Physical copies in file cabinets, shared drives, email chains, and workstations are all vulnerable to danger, data leakage, and contract loss. You may save your contracts on the cloud and have constant access to them with a centralised digital repository. Within your repository, you choose which metadata points to track for a single contract or collection of contracts. Obligations, compliance requirements, renewal dates, negotiation dates, deliverables, termination circumstances, key performance indicators (KPIs), dangerous clauses, and other vital and time-sensitive information are all common data elements that you can track efficiently with your software solution.
Companies that automate their contract storage using a digital contract repository benefit from increased workplace productivity and reduced contract risk, especially when dealing with a significant volume of complicated contracts on a regular basis.
2. Improve Your Contract Management Process
Contract task management must be effective if contract lifecycle management is to be successful. Contract managers must decide which contract info to include in their contract tracking methods on a first-come, first-served basis. They might, for example, choose to summarise essential data points like contract term start and end dates, renewal dates, expiration dates, contract value, obligations, payment deadlines, and so on. This gives you visibility into your contracts and allows you to establish a proactive culture around them.
A proactive contract manager outperforms a reactive contract manager in terms of efficiency. We highly advise that key stakeholders and staff get automated contract reminders in order to stay on top of approaching important dates and time-sensitive contract administration activities and obligations. Do you ever forget about auto-renewing or expired contracts? Then automatic reminders can come in handy. To be proactive, review your contracts and monitor your contract management practises on a regular basis. Contract evaluations will assist you in reducing risks and taking corrective and preventative action before possible threats turn into major issues. Contract management experts usually advise companies to start working on contracts that are due to expire at least a month ahead of time. This enables you to function properly.
3. Interact with Stakeholders
Contracts frequently involve two or more parties that have a financial stake in the result of the agreement. Contract managers must communicate with stakeholders on a regular basis to ensure that contract requirements are understood and that any complaints or clarifications are addressed as soon as possible.
- Here are a few points to go over with your stakeholders:
- Dates of contract expiry
- Renewal dates
- Deadlines for payments
- Obligations sDeliverables
- Indicators of Key Performance (Key Performance Indicators)
In terms of contract performance, you should talk to your stakeholders about what each contract entails and how it should be carried out. You may analyse your contracts together and make the required modifications if a contract fails to achieve performance targets. Additionally, keeping a thorough record of any contract amendments can assist you (this can also be found via audit trails.)
Conclusion
Using best-in-class contract management software that includes contract monitoring capabilities will help you speed up and increase contract transparency, internal communication, and contract outcomes. You can better manage risks while saving time and money by tracking contracts.
By making the status and performance of your contracts available to your stakeholders on demand, you can now offer them with contract data in real time. Do you want to know how far along a job contract is? In a matter of seconds, you'll have the answer. Adopting a system that tracks every agreement or clause for the best contract lifecycle management results would result in a more secure, risk-reducing contract lifecycle management.
