Contract administration can bring forth a host of challenges. Between establishing a contract administration plan, following through with that plan within a set timeline, tracking contract financials, overseeing the contract lifecycle and planning for risk variables, contract administrators have a lot on their plate – and a lot of room for error, contract risks and bottlenecks. Fortunately, contract management software can help. Here’s how.
What Is contract administration?
Contract administration is the planning and execution of contracts. It involves oversight of contract lifecycle management and the tracking of counterparties, contract financials, employees, contractual risk, contract security and access, and contract management KPIs.
What does a contract administrator do?
A contract administrator is tasked with creating and managing contracts with which an organisation is involved. A contract administrator is responsible for juggling the contract lifecycle, task management, counterparty relations, contract financials, contract risk and key dates and milestones. As such, contract administrators need an organised, seamless and centralised contract administration plan to successfully address all of these responsibilities.
What Is a contract administration plan?
A contract administration plan is a blueprint for addressing the important details and processes surrounding a contract. It is used by contract administrators and their teams to centralise the contract lifecycle, ensure the timely realisation of contract obligations, promote key date awareness, promote accountability, reconcile financials and budgets and strengthen counterparty relations. The best contract administration plans are supported by contract artificial intelligence.
Contract management software for better contract administration
Leading-edge contract management software can help contract administrators create the best possible contract administration plan. Essential contract management tools can help contract professionals with every facet of contract administration.
Comprehensive contract lifecycle management
No contract administrator should traverse the ever-changing landscape of contract administration with disorganised contract lifecycle management. Organisations need a robust solution for their contract administration plan that saves time, cuts costs, boosts revenue, and provides a low-friction experience.
Cutting-edge CLM software solutions support contract administrators with user-friendly interfaces for the entirety of the contract lifecycle – including:
- automated contract requests
- simplified contract authoring with the seamless merging of contracts with templates from an organisation’s pre-approved clause and template library
- a unified process for contract negotiation, collaboration, and review
- centralised and comprehensive contract analytics and contract data tracking
- automated key date notifications and alerts
- robust risk assessment, risk mitigation and risk analysis
- robust process configuration and tracking for specific contract types for a vast array of industries
- integrated RFx management (including for RFPs)
- easy yet detailed searching and reporting – which can include an ad hoc and custom report designer.
Intelligent contract risk assessment
Trusted contract lifecycle management software supports full risk assessment and OFAC search mapping so that contract administrators can graphically visualise risk for future-minded risk management. Rather than manually sifting through contract records for any risk variables, contract administrators and their teams can reap the benefits of a visualised graph system that can plot contracts based upon an automated risk score – providing user-friendly risk analysis measurements of active contracts that can help contract administrators prioritise important contract risk factors for enhanced decision-making. Furthermore, contract administrators and their teams can easily analyse intelligently projected contract performance with hypothetical risk variables and risk exposure variables within an eye-catching risk assessment matrix.
Contract administrators can utilise the aforementioned contract risk assessment matrix along with statistical data analysis to identify positive, neutral and negative contract aspects to help improve contract administration planning. Contract administrators can also reap the benefits of message alerts to alert employee users on their teams if a contract incurs a value of X% higher than the average within their CLM system database.
Contract administration financial data reports
An eye-catching contract financials page can provide contract administrators with a simple but comprehensive financial summary for each contract. The report can include basic contract details and contract data at a glance, such as:
- the sum of contract transactions
- the sum of contract expenses
- the total contract budget amount
- the contract budget amount remaining
- and the percentage of a contract budget that has been used.
Contract administrators can configure the Budget Used field within their contract management systems to set budget thresholds for contracts. For example, a contract administrator can configure an alert so that a contract’s owner is alerted once that contract’s used budget amount passes 80%.
In addition to reporting financial data for a specific contract, contract administrators can also run reports around contract financials of all contracts within their CLM systems. These reports can be set to run by categories such as by contract type, department, counterparty and various others.
Contract administrators are encouraged to use these contract management software financial data reports to attain a holistic view of contract finances.
Contract administration analytics with executive graphical dashboards
Leading contract administration software solutions offer visionary contract analytics and reporting tools to enhance contract lifecycle management. Contract Insight® – for instance – offers executive graphical dashboards to push contract analytics into the future.
Executive graphical dashboards that Contract Insight’s contract administrators can leverage include dashboards for:
- contracts KPI
- contracts overview
- counts by department
- legal
- vendor management
- year analysis
- bids overview.
Contract administration executive graphical dashboards – such as the one displayed above – not only serve as one among many reasons why Contract Insight is the premier contract administration software suite on the market, but they also simplify and streamline contract management software processes with the foremost contract management report tools.
Contract administration success with Contract Insight
If you – as a contract administrator – are interested in the functionality highlighted in this blog, you will be excited to know that Contract Insight offers so much more than contract administration tools alone
Contract Insight offers user-friendly features of contract management software – including those for the contract administration process – that can equip your team to efficiently secure and unite contracts, seamlessly collaborate, oversee contract compliance, track costs, receive alerts and notifications, push processes into the future with VISDOM® AI and machine learning, efficiently sign with IntelliSign® electronic signature software, boost productivity and decrease expenses.
Contract Insight from Four
Contract Insight is a cloud-hosted (SaaS) or deployed (on-premise) contract management 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 and Operations, across a broad range of industries.