Never miss a renewal or expiry with contract management software from Four
Today, contracts form the basis of most of our business agreements. Historically – prior to automation in the shape of contract management software – contract negotiations could be long and protracted. Memories of a tortuous process could mean that the will to renegotiate on contract renewal and/or expiry date is low.
Miss dates and miss out
A lack of will to renegotiate can result in the loss of an opportunity to ensure the best possible continuing terms for your enterprise. And with long-standing relationships – which require repeated renewal of contracts – the savings and opportunities to improve terms could be significant. You don’t want your business to lose out.
Implications of missing contract renewal or expiry
Managing contracts using a paper-based system can be a costly, risky process. Customer contract renewal dates can easily be missed leading to a loss of revenue and a disruption to your processes. Which is a real problem when you have lots of contracts and SLAs with a range of different suppliers, all due for renewal or expiry at different times. If you rely on manual contract management, it’s really easy to miss these critical dates.
If you forget to cancel a contract with a supplier, you might be hit with late cancellation fees, or you might automatically renew a contract that you no longer want and subsequently be tied in for another year. Or a contract you mean to renew is cancelled, with disruption to your critical processes, resulting in unhappy customers and a loss of reputation.
The risks of poor contract management
When it comes to contract management, renewal or cancellation you can probably quite easily divide your contracts into customer and supplier contracts. There are risks to both kinds of contracts if you don’t manage them effectively.
Customer contracts – the risks
- Loss of revenue
- Customer dissatisfaction and churn
- Additional time and cost implications
- Increased level of customer debt
Supplier contracts – the risks
- Loss of service or support
- Increased renewal costs
- Time and cost implications
- Loss of revenue
- Need for contract renegotiation
Contract management software (CMS) is the answer
With contract management software, there’s no reason for contract renegotiation and renewal to be painful. In fact it can be just the opposite – automated workflow takes care of negotiation and management. Four Business Solutions recommend Contract Insight contract CMS to take care of your contract lifecycle.
Contract Insight – Enterprise Edition
Contract Insight will help your organisation achieve all the benefits that software-assisted contract management brings. With Contract Insight you can:
- manage any type of contract, agreement, patents, leases and licenses
- manage revenue contracts, expense contracts, master/sub contracts, milestones, task orders, action items etc.
- track important contract data fields – with user configurable fields based on type of contract
- track vendor/client data including dates, alerts, text, amounts, and related contract information
- contracts using templates from a range of interfaces including your web browser or your smartphone
- all stakeholders can access centralised contract data from any web-browser
- track contracts according to your standard codes, categories, departments, locations
- track contract workflow processes and approval statuses
- easily renew contracts with a click of the mouse and link to previous terms to retain history.
Some advantages of CMS at a glance
- Re-programmed renewal/expiry notification emails will ensure you know that the renewal/expiry date is coming up, so you can check all your contracts and explore any opportunities to improve terms or decide to renew a contract due to expire. This has knock-on – positive – implications for profit margins and incorrect or late billing.
- The options to comment and redline, simple automated approval and auto reminders take all the pain out of the process. The pre-approved info that you have – the correct clauses, templates and locked content – will ensure that no errors creep in whether you are renewing, renegotiating or concluding a contract.
- CMS will also ensure contract renewal uses the most up to date version, kept current with any legal changes or compliance requirements.
- You can pull in data from external sources to keep data current – data that may suggest contractual changes are necessary.
- Your customers are also automatically notified prior to renewal and have the same opportunities as you have to review, approve or renegotiate terms.
- All contracts are accessible on a secure, self- service portal with the opportunity to use electronic signatures to further secure and speed up contract activity.
- Your and your customers can also track the status of any open support issues, which might have implications for contract renewal.
Four Business Solutions
Four Business Solutions helps small and multi-national organisations enrich the way they work. From supply chain to procurement and contract management, we have decades of experience helping companies forge ahead in the global market. If you’d like to find out more please call John O’Brien at Four Business Solutions on 0800 6250 025.
John O’Brien is the CEO at Four Business Solutions, global business consultants and software integrators providing business processes improvements in Finance, Supply Chain and Operations, across a broad range of industries.