The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed contract management, procurement and sourcing professionals into new, uncharted waters regarding their business operations. Organisations need to quickly find ways to cut contract-related costs and save money during times of crisis such as pandemics, economic recessions, company acquisitions/mergers and downturns in business. Four’s Contract Insight can help you do this. Here’s how.
Ad-hoc reports on Contract Insight
Users can quickly run reports with Contract Insight’s flexible ad-hoc reporting tool. This useful feature allows you to see a chosen list of contract records and counterparty information based on user-specified filters, with system and user-defined fields (e.g., active contracts with a contract amount over £10,000). Additionally, you can identify non-essential contractual categories to streamline the reporting process.
With Contract Insight, your users can run a virtually unlimited number of ad-hoc reports. Reports can be saved and edited. Common ad-hoc report filters include:
- active contracts
- expiring contracts
- expired contracts
- contract value
- budgets
- contracts by department
- contracts under review
- key dates.
During times of crisis, you can leverage ad-hoc reporting with Contract Insight to quickly identify contracts that meet important criteria and thresholds. Ad-hoc reporting can help your users find specific contracts and avoid wasting time searching through those that don’t meet defined conditions. In turn, you can identify unnecessary contract costs and address them to save money.
Contract request intake process
Contract Insight’s software enables businesses like yours to implement a contract request intake process.
Contract Insight administrators can create a contract request form to be uploaded directly into the system. Users can then enter contract information, upload the request, and submit it to their administrator quickly and seamlessly. And a simple workflow-triggered alert can be configured so that accounting departments or controllers are notified if the amount requested is over a certain threshold.
If you use Contract Insight you can quickly enable an intelligent contract request intake process, in the event of any crisis. Such a solution significantly hastens the intake process because it enables employees who typically submit contracts for legal review via disparate emails, to submit them via Contract Insight instead. In turn, you can easily track due dates, contract review status and counterparty names in one centralised location as a team – saving time and money when it matters most.
Contract Insight’s dashboards and email alerts
On Contract Insight, you can use a range of different dashboards to create reports of open contract requests. Dashboards appear by contract status, and different dashboards can be made available to different user groups. For example, an administrator can configure their system so that users from the accounting department can see request alerts and reports pertinent to only the accounting department upon logging in. In contrast, a user from the human resources department only sees request alerts and reports associated with their department.
And you can configure alerts with links to relevant reports to be sent out to employees by automated email – even if they’re not licensed users. For instance, you might establish a recurring email alert that prompts your CFO to view an executive dashboard showing contracts by budget. These Contract Insight dashboards and email alerts are important tools that keep contract management and legal teams on the same page, reduce bottlenecks, promote accountability and improve bottom lines.
Manage business costs with Contract Insight
Contract Insight is a cloud-hosted (SaaS) or deployed (on-premise) source-to-contract solution. The acclaimed platform is trusted by thousands of professionals for their contract management, legal document management, procurement and sourcing needs.
Used by many Fortune 500 companies, Contract Insight gives you real time visibility into your contracts. It doesn’t just shore up your security; it will help you meet contract compliance regulations, centralise your contract management and improve your overall contract administration process.
For more information, contact John O’Brien, CEO at Four Business Solutions, global business consultants and software integrators providing business processes improvements in Finance, Supply Chain & Operations, across a broad range of industries.