In today’s fast-paced business environment, contract management has become a crucial task for every organization. Companies need to track, manage, and analyze contracts efficiently to ensure compliance and mitigate risks. 

The good news is that in recent years, technology has evolved to make contract management simpler and more efficient. Read on to explore what contract management software can do for your business in 2023.

What is Contract Management Software?

Contract management software is a digital tool that helps businesses govern their contracts throughout their lifecycle. It is designed to streamline the contract management process, making it easier for companies to create, negotiate, execute, and monitor contracts across your organization.

Contract management software can typically store all contract-related information in one place, such as contract terms, parties involved, payment terms, and important dates and clauses. It can also provide features such as automated alerts, reporting, and analytics to help users stay on top of their contracts and ensure compliance.

In short: Contract management software removes manual steps from your business’ contract management processes, making it faster and easier to get things done.

Here are the top ways contract software can make your business more efficient in 2023:

Create a Centralized, Easy Access Point for All Your Contracts

Contract management software can allow your business to centralize all contracts in a single location, enabling easy access, sharing, and collaboration across departments, teams, and stakeholders. Creating a centralized repository ensures that all of your organization’s contracts are easy-to-locate, simplifying contract management and renewals. 

Having one place for all your contracts helps avoid the frustration of not being able to find the most recently edited document you could have sworn was saved on your desktop somewhere. 

Streamline Contract Collaboration

Contract management software allows you to collaborate seamlessly with internal and external stakeholders on contracts. You can share contract documents and data, assign tasks, and receive feedback in real-time. With contract management software, you can see – in one quick glance – what documents still have to be signed and by whom, helping avoid panic over a missed deadline or an overlooked task. This improved collaboration increases transparency and enables teams to work together more efficiently. 

Speed Up the Contract Management Lifecycle Processes 

The best contract management software solutions allow you to draft, redline, approve, eSign, report on, and renew contracts all in one easy-to-use platform. This eliminates multi-stepped processes that slow down negotiation times, saving you time, headaches, and money.

These are the specific ways that contract management  lifecycle (CLM) software solutions can help improve efficiencies in your organization’s lifecycle management process:

Accelerate Pre-Signature/Content Creation

Instead of lawyers having to draft new contracts for every vendor, the best digital contract management software provides templates, standard clauses, and other tools that make it easier to draft and customize contracts. Not only does this take away some of the tedious parts of the work, it also helps ensure that contracts are consistent and comply with legal and regulatory requirements as well as company values.

Facilitate the Negotiation Process

The best CLM tools help speed up contract negotiations by facilitating collaboration between parties during the negotiation process and allowing real-time editing and comments on documents. No longer do you have to rely on email to wait for edits to come in. Instead, contract management software facilitates negotiations by allowing parties to discuss and make changes to the contract simultaneously.

Keep Track of Edits and Redlines

Contract management software can track changes made to the document, which can help parties keep track of the negotiation process. Version control can also help parties identify and address any discrepancies that arise during negotiations. Having a record of changes ensures also all stakeholders have a holistic view of any modifications that were made during the negotiation process.

Provide Automated Approval Workflows

Anyone who has ever sat waiting on a final contract signature knows time matters. The best CLM solutions automate the signing and execution of contracts, including electronic signatures and automated workflows, getting you to execution quicker and reducing the risk of errors.

Notify You of Contract Renewal Deadlines

When it comes time to renewals, it’s important to have as much time as possible to look over the terms and clauses and negotiate the best deals possible with vendors. Contract management software can help streamline the process by providing reminders, alerts, and automated workflows to initiate renewal discussions and negotiations. 

Generate Advanced Reports and Analytics

Knowledge is power when it comes to your contract data. Contract management software enables you to generate advanced reports and analytics on contract performance, such as contract duration, renewal rates, and compliance levels. These insights help you make informed decisions and improve CLM processes continually.

Enhance Security and Compliance

There are many things that keep lawyers and compliance officers up at night, one of which is the fear that older, executed contracts might not be in compliance with updated laws. 

Contract management software helps enhance security and compliance by providing robust access controls, audit trails, and encryption. These features help protect your confidential contract data and ensure that your business complies with relevant regulations and standards and organizational values.

What Does It Mean for a Contract Management System to Be AI-Powered?

AI-powered contract management systems utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate and streamline the content management process. The system uses algorithms, statistical models, and optical character recognition to extract key data points from contracts, such as contracts terms, obligations, and deadlines.

With AI-powered CLM solutions, the systems have been pre-trained to recognize dozens of common clauses based on real-world examples. The most accurate AI-powered systems have been trained on millions of contracts. 

Just as with human learning, the more time a system spends understanding and learning a subject and the more data points they have to refer to, the better they perform.

What This Means in Practical Terms

While the most basic contract management systems operate mainly as storage systems and organizational tools, AI can transform your static contract documents into dynamic, searchable data.

Here’s a bit of what AI-powered contract management software can do, as opposed to a basic contract management system:

Analyze Large Amounts of Data Quickly

It’s important, for your business, to understand the content of your contracts. When you’re using a basic contract management system – not powered by AI – employees or outside counsel must go through all your contracts manually in order to amass information on things like deadlines, payment terms, and anomalies.  

The best AI-powered contract management systems, by contrast, can accurately scan and analyze thousands of pages of contract data in minutes, providing you with a fully indexed, searchable digital portfolio of your commitments, expiration dates, and risk exposures.

Help You Make More Strategic, Data-Informed Business Decisions 

AI-powered contract management systems use predictive algorithms to analyze past data and identify trends and patterns that can inform future decisions for your business. 

For example, they can predict which clauses are likely to cause disputes and suggest changes to reduce risk.  AI-powered CLM solutions also provide you with increased visibility into your data by making information previously locked away in static documents, searchable. With this accessible contract repository at their fingertips, stakeholders are able to make more strategic decisions. 

With AI-powered contract management solutions,  Chief Financial Officers, for instance, can see, in real time, how much revenue is tied up and make changes based on their cash position. Procurement professionals can use AI powered contract software to enrich visibility into supplier obligation and improve compliance.

Help You Scale Up

As companies grow, and contracts start numbering in the thousands, smaller departments require a more seamless way to keep up with contracting demands at scale.

Unlike basic contract management systems, AI powered contract software systems automates the process of creating, negotiating, and managing contracts. As contracts come in, AI-powered CLM software can automatically review contracts, pull in relevant data points and flag potential issues.

When teams are drafting new contracts, AI-powered contract management software provides access to a variety of templates and clause libraries that can be used as starting points for drafting contracts. The best AI-powered contract management software can be customized to your specific needs and integrate with existing tools, which saves time and helps ensure consistency across contracts.

Beef Up Your Security

Today, fines for not adhering to updated compliance and data privacy laws can cost your company millions of dollars. Unlike basic contract management systems, AI-powered software can monitor contracts in real-time and provide alerts when there are changes or updates to regulations or policies that impact the contract. 

This helps organizations stay compliant with regulatory data privacy and compliance requirements and avoid penalties, allowing  your organization’s lawyers and compliance officers to sleep better at night.

Why Evisort?

Evisort is the industry leader in contract intelligence. Our platform offers an end-to-end contract management solution built around a best-in-class AI-powered core architecture.

Evisort’s proprietary AI is fast, accurate, and easy to use, allowing you to process 450,000 documents in only one day and providing you with a single source of truth for connected contract data. Evisort’s new generative AI capabilities make it even easier for users to draft and redline contracts based on the preferred language and existing contracts that are unique to their organization.

We have pre-trained our AI on millions of contract samples and billions of data points, and combined with other smart features such as built-in approval workflows, document synchronization with external storage, advanced searching options, Evisort delivers a best-in-class contract management platform, with unparalleled accuracy.

The best part? You can get launched in only 30 days.

Learn more about how Evisort is helping businesses like yours accelerate innovation, streamline operations, and grow their business.

Check out some of our customer success stories and schedule a demo today!

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