What businesses should be looking for in a contract management software in 2018?

Contracts are basic foundational that commerce is built upon, overseeing every dollar coming in and going out of the business. After all these years, contracting processes remains a common challenge for organizations.

Automating these processes will help businesses accelerate time to revenue. The pace of commerce is quickening, and today’s businesses face ever-growing demands to deliver faster. To withstand all these never-ending demands and help your business automate managing contracts it is necessary to use a contract management software at one point or the other. Using spreadsheets or excel sheets are just a short-term solution that would suck in much time and are prone to human errors.

To help you choose the best software for your business we, at Apptivo, have compiled some of the essential features that any businesses should for before asking the software to move-in with you.

Customization

Business software shouldn’t be following the one-size-fits-all approach. The features needed for one business would be useless to another. It’s important to allow customers to customize the software to a certain extent to better configure the software for their needs.

Once the software is inside an organization, it’s users might want to customize them to their personal needs. Let’s take dashboard for example. DIfferent users and teams would want information to be displayed on the dashboard relevant to their task. So, individual users should also have the ability to customize the dashboard. It shouldn’t be locked only to the admins.

At times, the user might be focused on a different objective like expediting renewals and at other times on an entirely different objective. Look for a contract management system that allows you to customize the software with no from help from administrators or developers assistance.

E-Signature

Contract management software should allow every stage of the contract lifecycle to be digitized, including execution. With e-sign in place, you can bid almost bye-bye to the traditional paper and pen. Every process will be genuinely digitized from creating the contract, signing it, and sending it. All in a snap of a finger. Isn’t that convenient? So, look for a software that has a built-in e-signature facility or easily integrates with other e-signature solutions out there.

Easy Configuration

The whole point in bringing the contract management software is to make business processes easier. However, if the software you choose that require custom code development every time you want to create new workflows, rules, and fields? The, it’s just another bomb waiting to go off. It’s just more work.

Effective contract management solutions allow admins/super-users to easily configure the application to a new business plan, avoiding the need for code changes using developer assistance.

User Permissions

There might be times where you would want only to have a look at the high profile contracts. This is where User Permission comes in. If your software isn’t equipped with features to support users and access based on roles, then it’s time for a change.

Contract management software should include Role Based Access Control system that oversees access to contract data based on roles and permission, to protect confidential data.

Global Searches

This might seem trivial but the amount of time and frustration. This simple search saves is phenomenal.

If your current or would-be software can’t search for contract related agreements, documents, comments, notes, etc., your business could be at risk. Useful contract management software allows you to find what you’re looking for with a simple search that captures the texts in documents, metadata, and all the related information.

We hope this post helped you get started with your search for new contract management software and with that step you’ve already half won. Now, all that’s left is to choose the right software.