#contractprocesses

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With many businesses making an abrupt shift to remote work in light of the current pandemic — or even if your business has decided to offer remote options for employees for other reasons — it has become increasingly important for employees to be able to access contract records from anywhere they are. Employees who cannot access contracts cannot complete many of their daily work responsibilities, including negotiating and approving contracts. So you want to be sure they have the tools they need to be successful, including systems so they can access contracts at home.

1. Make sure all your contracts are stored in one place.

Finding a contract that could be in any of several repositories is frustrating enough when you're in the office and can easily ask others around you where that information is stored. Finding that information remotely, on the other hand, can prove much more challenging. As you make the transition to remote work, make sure all your contracts are stored in one place. You should also check your naming system to ensure that employees can easily locate the contracts they need within those systems. Ideally, your naming system should be intuitive and easy to understand. 

2. Use cloud storage that employees can access contracts at home.

With a cloud-based contract management system, you don't have to worry about the servers at the office going down when no one is in the office. Instead, employees can easily access contracts from anywhere, whether they're at home, in the office, or on the road. Cloud storage also provides an additional layer of security that can help protect your vital records, including your documents and internal systems, when employees access contracts from home. 

3. Check your security and your permissions so employees can access contracts at home.

Many employees are shifting to remote work in a hurry. But you still need to carefully consider how your contract management solution keeps your contracts as secure as possible. As you make the transition to remote work for your business, make sure that you: Clearly assign permissions based on the files employees across the company should be able to access.  You don't want remote employees to be able to access contracts they don't have permission to access, especially when it comes to private information. At the same time, however, you may need to carefully check your permissions to make sure that each employee has the permissions needed to accomplish his job responsibilities. As access issues arise, make sure you address them at the source. Don’t rely on complex workarounds so your employees can access contracts at home. Make sure you have strong security in place.  You can't control the security of the networks and devices employees are using to access work accounts when they work remotely. You can, however, control the security on your end. This is the ideal time to update your security. Ensure that you don't have any holes that could allow access to your confidential documents.

4. Make sure you can easily identify the latest version of the contract.

Since employees aren't gathering together in person, it may be more difficult to pass on information about your business. For example, say you've recently modified a contract while working with coworkers in the office. Then, you might mention that it's been updated in your next meeting. You might even share it with other team members in passing. While working remotely, on the other hand, it can prove more difficult to keep up with that information.  Use a numbering or naming system that clearly designates the latest version of a contract. Alternatively, utilize a contract management system that allows you to easily track the latest versions of each document. That way, you'll know that everyone is on the same page and accessing the same version of the document. 

5. Don't forget about signatures. 

NDA documents are among some of your most important contracts. Managing multiple NDAs can overwhelm even the most seasoned professional. The details of what they contain can vary depending upon their purpose, requiring a balancing act among different staff. First, take a look at our guide to creating a comprehensive NDA management system that utilizes the best aspects of our software. Then follow this quick guide to make sure your NDA management process can make your business grow. Creating an NDA management process that benefits your organization is less stressful and more transparent with the right software system. 

Utilize Existing Data Better

You most likely have a system in place that contains important data. Oftentimes, it is systems, plural, due to the varying projects and partnerships. Scattered information across different formats is dangerous for several reasons, such as: Details are easily missed by the right people, like legal counsel.One or more systems can crash, leaving part of your information lost, possibly forever.Employee turnover forces the movement of files from one system to another. A data migration specialist can transform your chaos into a new system that better streamlines your NDA management process. Migrating your spreadsheets into a contract software system like that of ContraxAware is possible with minimum guidance. Once you discover the ease of having your data in one place, you can spend more time building your company instead of protecting it.

Create Proactive Documents

Once you've built a successful business, you want to protect it. All it takes is one disgruntled employee or vendor to wreck what it took years to create. An NDA agreement is a proactive approach to protecting the confidential information that contributes to your success.  The leadership team of ContraxAware brings more than 30 years of business law experience to the table. That experience, along with more than 30 years of software development experience, results in templates that your legal counsel can appreciate. Finding the right template for a particular partnership or project is easy using the built-in database in ContraxAware. Simply add the terms and conditions, include the duration of the agreement, as well as the consequences for violating the agreement.  Specifying these key pieces of information is vital to a proactive approach now, rather than a reactive approach later. 

Collaborate

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines collaboration as, "to work jointly with others or together, especially in an intellectual endeavor."  Strong collaboration is essential across several departments when it comes to your NDAs.  Having one source for your various departments to access, review, revise, and document important contracts saves enormous amounts of time. A contract management system streamlines your NDA process so that everyone involved is working literally off the same page.  Collaboration reaches beyond your legal counsel, development team, and others within your company. Never overlook the value of your IT department when it comes to involvement with your contract management software. Their support is invaluable when you need it the most. 

Launch

Once your NDA agreement is ready to send to the appropriate contacts, you launch it and await their response. Their reply is where ContraxAware can take your contract process a step further with alerts and reminders. A business contract has little value without a signature. Many NDA agreements require a signature in more than one location throughout the document. ContraxAware can alert you to incomplete information from the vendor or potential partner. It can also remind you of contracts that are about to expire or that are up for renewal. ContraxAware has your back when it comes to details you may overlook so that you never let a contract lapse again. 

About ContraxAware

Contract management: it's an incredibly important element of any business. You want to be sure that you keep up with your contract at every stage through the process. That doesn’t mean just the negotiation or ‘pre-signature’ stages, either. Contract management extends throughout the life of service terms and, hopefully, into the renewal term that follows. This ensures that you do not allow those vital customers to fall away. Also, it improves your ability to create effective contracts with low risk for your business.  By carefully considering each piece of the contract management process, you can:  Improve your interactions with your customers.Automate many of the pieces of your contract management cycleUltimately, streamline your efforts to make your business more successful. Start by learning more about each of the nine stages: The Request PhaseThe Draft PhaseThe Negotiation PhaseThe Approval PhaseExecutionCompleting Your ObligationsMaintaining ComplianceAuditingRenewal This chart is a useful reminder of how cyclical the process is — as well as how important it is to have procedures in place for each stage so the contract process moves smoothly.

Why Should You Have a Clear Contract Management Process?

Scalable processes are the only way to grow. If your contract management process is too manual, too clunky, or based entirely on one person’s knowledge of the system’s ins and outs, your company is vulnerable. These nine stages form the basis of every strong contract management process. You can customize each phase to best fit your business by creating process documents. This makes your business more capable of growth, more attractive to your investors, and more streamlined during day-to-day operations. You can also quickly modify a standardized contract management process in an emergency, such as if an executive is leaving the company...

1. The Request Phase

During the request phase, you're creating the basics of the contract. These are the details that you and your client need to include in order to create a successful business relationship. This phase of the contract is the first stage of the negotiation process and, in many cases, your first look at a client's specific needs. During the request phase, consider these key details: 1. What are you hoping to accomplish with the contract?  That is, what is your business's goal? As your business develops, you may also develop more detailed requirements of what you hope to accomplish with your contract. You can also decide what clauses need to be included moving forward.  2. What is the customer hoping to accomplish?  Typically, your customer wants to hire you to complete a specific job: either to put together a one-time effort or to ask for your services on a long-term basis. Make sure you understand your customer's goals during the request phase of the contract cycle. Then, you can create more effective contracts that better reflect customer needs. If your company has different product lines or recently acquired another company, you might even have multiple MSAs to choose from.  3. What expectations do you and your customer have for this process?  That is, do you have specific milestones that need to be met? Is it going to be your company’s paper or the customer’s? When during the process do you expect to be paid? Setting out your expectations clearly during the request phase and making sure you understand your client's expectations is important. Knowing both perspectives will make it easier to create a solid contract that benefits both parties.

2. The Draft Phase

During the draft phase, you'll put together the basic outline of the contract.  To make this easier, your contract management software should have standard contracts on hand. These include basic templates for the terms of service and outlines that express the expected services as a whole. If your customer has unique expectations and requirements, this is the time to include them. On the other hand, you may find that many customers are content with the standard terms of your contract and need little negotiation or discussion.  During the draft phase, you want to keep up with each version of the contract while clearly displaying which version you're currently using. While you might not begin negotiations during this period, you may need to make changes as you continue to communicate with your client. Make sure your contract management software or solution will allow you to easily store and refer back to previous incarnations of the contract if needed. This phase should focus on the statements of work, schedules, and other variables of the deliverables.

3. The Negotiation Phase

The negotiation phase is one of the most important phases of the contract cycle. It's critical that you empower your negotiators to ensure that they have the right tools on hand to meet their objectives — and that they have all the information they need to negotiate on behalf of the company. Ideally, you want your negotiators to be able to create contracts that will move quickly through your company's contract approval process without manual intervention. The more you standardize the process and the negotiation countermoves your team can make, the more independently (and quickly) they can act.  Consider these automations and easy process improvements: 1. Keep a standard contract on hand.  Many of your clients won't need to make many — or, in some cases, any — modifications to your standard contracts. If you have a standard contract on hand and available to your contract negotiators during that process, you can often make the negotiation and requesting phase easier. In fact, start your “negotiation” by having the salesperson send the document for signature with the order form. 2. Make sure your negotiators know which points are not up for negotiation.  There are some areas of your contract that are hard and fast: the details that you're not willing to give on. Make sure your negotiators know what those are. Then, they won’t accidentally make promises that the company can't keep. 3. Create a document with a list of the concessions you’re willing to make.  Design a list that includes the places you're willing to negotiate and what your standard range is. Start by reading our quick guide to the process so you can send out the document within the week. Making this list readily available to your negotiators gives them the power to act with confidence. They don't have to display it to the clients — and, in fact, they shouldn't. But they should always have an idea of what your range looks like so that they can meet it effectively.  4. Work milestones into the contract.  Make sure you understand what your clients' milestones are, and include them as part of the early stages of the contract. Start this step during the draft process so that when the time comes to create the contract, you can easily piece it together. 

4. The Approval Phase

During the approval phase, your business (and your client's business) have a chance to look over the contract and decide whether to approve it. Some businesses have multiple steps to the approval process. Your company may require the contract to pass through multiple hands before you can let clients know that it has been approved. Keep these things in mind during the approval phase of your contract cycle: 1. Streamline the approval phase as much as possible.  In this case, many hands do not make light work! The more hands your contract has to move through before approval, the longer it takes — and the greater the likelihood the client will grow frustrated with the process. Instead, try to streamline your contract approval: remove unnecessary steps, automate what you can, and keep client needs in mind.  2. Set deadlines.  It's all too easy for contracts to fall through the cracks during the approval process. Set clear deadlines so that each member of the team knows what they need to accomplish and when in order to meet both your goals and your client's. If you’re using an automated contract management tool, you can set a clock that starts whenever the document moves from one tier of approval to the next. 3. Keep track of who has the contract throughout the entire approval process.  You should be able to easily track each contract through the approval process. Ideally, you should set your contract management software to issue notifications if something goes wrong. This can include if the contract does not continue to move through the approval process or if it's taken too long to get the contract set in place. Tracking the owners of different processes doesn’t just let you keep an eye on moving documents; it lets you adjust the process whenever people move in and out of the company. Spend a little time strengthening your approval phase by reading what steps you should take so in-progress contracts don’t fall through the cracks. 

5. Execution

Once you've approved the contract, it's time to execute it! First and foremost, both parties must sign the contract. Only once the contract has been signed can you begin work on the client's job.  Depending on your contract and your business, there may also be other steps that need to be taken during the contract execution phase: connecting with other partners or finding a supplier for specific materials, for example. In some cases, you may need to obtain signatures for more than one party before you can begin working on the contract.  Use your contract management software to highlight anything that needs to take place during the execution stage of the contract. This software may also be used to note when those items have been taken care of, allowing you to track the contract's execution more effectively. 

6. Completing Your Obligations

You've approved and executed the contract. Now, you must complete your obligations to your customers — and your customers will complete their obligations, including payment, to you. During this stage of the contract lifecycle, it's important to consider how your interactions with your customers play out.  Are you meeting your customer's expectations?  As you meet your obligations, consider these key factors: 1. Are you meeting the customer's needs?  During the obligation phase of the contract lifecycle, you have the chance to show your customers why they hired you — and why they should hire you again in the future. Keep in mind that the best customers last for far more than one contract lifecycle. They have a much higher lifetime value if they return to your business for their future industry needs.  2. Is the customer meeting their end of the contract?  A customer who, for example, fails to pay their invoices on time could prove detrimental to your company overall. If a large customer isn’t paying, that can quickly interfere with your business's cash flow. If a customer routinely fails to meet their end of the contract, it may change the way you bargain with them in the future. You may need to create steeper penalties for late payment, take smaller jobs at a time, or choose not to work with the customer in the future. 3. Does the contract effectively meet your company's needs?  You probably have an effective contract scoring system that helps determine the risk associated with your contracts early in the process. Still, risks can show up unexpectedly or seemingly little negotiation points can fall through the cracks. Use the obligation phase to carefully monitor how your current contracts are meeting your company's needs. If you’re not sure how to start measuring these impacts, read our guide about identifying and evaluating KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, for your business contracts.

7. Maintaining Compliance

In addition to meeting your customers' needs, your business must maintain certain minimum compliance standards. In many cases, those compliance standards are built into your contracts from the beginning. Other times, you may need to revisit them as you move through the obligation phase of the contract. Customers should never ask you to step outside of industry compliance standards. They may, however, require you to go above and beyond those standards. It’s increasingly important to offer better security, for example.  You must also be sure, as you're meeting your obligations, that you comply with every area of the contract. Your contract management software may include the option to pull out that important information, ensuring that you are not falling short of any of your obligations or failing to meet industry compliance standards. Start automating the process and make potential violations more transparent by reading our quick guide.

8. Auditing

After you have met your obligations, you will want to look back over your contract to ensure that everything went according to plan. Regular contract auditing shouldn't be something that occurs only at the end of the year or if you suspect that there's a problem. Instead, you should include contract auditing as a regular part of your contract lifestyle. Implement these internal audit initiatives so your contracts — and your contract repository — stay healthy all year long. Evaluate: 1. Did the customer get exactly what they asked for?  Did you deliver the product the customer requested in a timely and effective manner? If you deliver the value the customer expected, the customer is more likely to pay on time and renew the contract. 2. Did you issue the right charges to the customer?  Pay careful attention to any invoices sent to your customers. Failing to invoice a customer properly could cause cash flow issues for your business, but accidentally sending a too-high invoice could cause even more problems. During your audit, make sure that the customer was charged the right amount at the right time.  3. What could you do better in the future?  This is a great time to look over your contract and ensure that it performed, in execution, the way you imagined during the drafting and approval phase. What looks great on paper may not always work as well in reality — so during the auditing phase, take a hard look at what worked for your company and what didn't so that you can make changes to your contract in the future. 

9. Renewal

Renewability: it's a top priority for your business, especially if you're highly focused on bringing in customers who will stay with your business long-term and increase their lifetime value. Are you paying attention to the right KPIs, or key performance indicators, that focus on your contracts' renewability? It’s important to shape your contract records around the principles that are best for your business. This article can help you start to identify strong KPIs. Make sure these KPIs are at the top of your list, too:

1. What percentage of your customers are already renewing?

Take a look at your contracts over their lifecycle. What percentage of your customers are renewing their contracts — and what percentage of your customers are falling away, either choosing not to renew their services at all or looking to your competitors for their needs in your industry? This metric can help you gauge the strength of your business as a whole. It’s just as important to take a look at what percentage of your income comes from annual or renewed contracts. Are you constantly having to look for new business, or noting that your business is currently in a state of growth? While it’s important to have new customers coming in on a regular basis, having a lot of your business's income is generated by repeat customers gives you stable growth.

2. What is the cost-effectiveness of each contract?

You carefully choose the terms of your contract, including what you will charge your customers, to ensure that it offers the maximum benefit to your business without overcharging your customers. If you want to check on your contracts' renewability, however, make sure you're focusing on the cost-effectiveness of that contract. A relatively low-risk contract with fairly high profitability is a contract you may want to set to auto-renew or renew for a longer contract term. Because it's highly effective for your business, you want to maintain this customer and work with them in the future. On the other hand, if a contract is not particularly cost-effective — it uses materials that are more costly than anticipated, or it has cost more in manpower than originally assumed — you may want to set that one in the "renegotiate" stack. In some cases, you may choose not to renew with your client at all. In other cases, you may prefer to take a second look at the terms. 

3. How much of the contract's value has been paid?

When you work for a client, you do it with the expectation of payment. As you focus on renewability, you don't just want to renew contracts. You want to renew effective contracts that are actually working for your business (and allowing you to pay your own bills on time). Before renewing a contract with an existing client, take a look at how much value remains in that contract. Check with your AR department to see if they have outstanding invoices or a history of late payments. A client who has failed to pay off the contract in a timely manner might not be one you want to renew a relationship with in the future. 

4. How long is your contracting cycle length?

Every day a potential contract sits in somebody’s inbox waiting for approval, is a day your form isn’t making money on the deal. Each day also gives your potential customer more time to question their decision to trust you. Too often, the contract approval process is cumbersome, and functions as a bottleneck for the sales team. Salespeople are anxious to close deals to earn commissions, and management needs the sales team to be able to move on to other prospects as quickly as possible. Contract management software can help streamline your current contract approval process.

Diagram Current Process

The first step towards creating a more efficient contract approval process is to understand how your current process works. You might think you already understand your current process. However, chances are there are many informal steps that aren’t listed in your set of standard operating procedures. You need to diagram your current process. Ask every person in the process what they understand the approval process to be—document both the formal and informal steps. For example, one typical informal step in a contract approval process is when a salesperson contacts the assistant for an executive with signoff authority to check on the status of the contract. You can’t improve the process until you fully understand what is happening today.

Ask Why for Each Step

Once you know what each step in the process is, you need to ask for the reason behind each step. Sometimes the reason might be that things have always been done this way. Some steps might be to satisfy the legal department, and other steps might be because individual executives want to be kept in the loop. Once you start asking about the “why” for each step, you will start seeing steps that you can eliminate.

Limit Approvals to One Person Per Department

Next, it’s time to start making some changes. Start with eliminating duplicative steps. There never needs to be more than one person in a department signing off on a contract. Often the reason multiple levels of people feel like they need to sign off on a contract is because of a lack of an official communication and documentation system for contracts. Contract management software will allow you to create an audit trail that managers can quickly check. Instead of having a document in a physical inbox, you can use the software to digitally “check-out” the contract. Anyone will be able to use the software to check the status of the contract.

Create Written Procedures Covering Each Step

While you are creating a new, streamlined contract sign-off procedure, you need to meticulously document each step. Informal processes generate more opportunities for mistakes. They also result in wasted time and energy. By creating a new formal set of written procedures, you can eliminate the waste of informal procedures. The new standard operating procedures for contract approval should be distributed to everyone involved in the process.

Use Automated Alerts and Document Tracking