What is a Contract Management Software?

We have highlighted the importance of contract management in a company. Now, one must make sure that an effective system is put in place to ensure that contract management can be implemented in a structured and timely manner. A contract management software ensures that all the requisite processes are carried out in a proper manner. A Contract management software can be defined as a ‘program or series of related programs for storing and managing legal agreements such as contracts with vendors, leases and licensing agreements.’ Its objective is to organize administrative tasks and to reduce overhead by producing a single-unified view of each contract’s processes.

Features of a contract management tool

Now that we have been introduced to a contract management software we must look at why they are so indispensable.

• To begin with, contract management software can be used to manage a new contract request.
• Secondly, it stores data relating to contract and document authoring, contract creation and negotiation.
• The software then monitors the contract and it can be used for review and approval process thereby providing documentation for digital signatures and execution along with post-execution tracking and commitments management.
• It is advantageous as it provides business owners with enhanced visibility into the status of a particular It also smoothens reporting and compliance.
• It provides business owners with alert notifications for critical dates that affect a contract like the cut-off date for contract renewal or an end of life (EOL) date. While certain low-end products merely provide templates for users to create and store their own hard-copy contracts, those of a higher end provide tools for creating and managing contracts electronically as well as automating the digital management of a contract throughout its lifecycle.

Attributes of a good Contract Management tool

It is clear that a contract management software is laden with a number of vital attributes. There are features that make a COMS tool stand out. They are;

1. Usability

Usability of COMS tool encourages organizations to use a Contract Management Software.It is easy to use for the following reasons,

• Document generation only takes a few clicks
• The ability to easily edit and availability of version documents
• Workflow is all on one page, so the user doesn’t have to jump all over the tool

2. Rapid Deployment

Rapid deployment ensures on the go solutions to problems involving contracts. Another advantage of rapid deployment is reduced Professional Services costs — if it’s deployed quickly, you won’t need service hours for set-up.

3. Minimize custom code deployment and management:

An intuitive Contract Management Software that allows configuration can mitigate problems associated with custom coding.

4. Scalability and Flexibility

A good Contract Management Software must adapt to the changing need of the user in order to avoid being redundant.

Therefore one can assume that a Contract Management Software is the be all and end all of the contract management processes.