With the increasing number of personal and business legal obligations, documents such as contracts, lease deeds, agreements, etc., are now essential to our lives. Companies are more contract-based than ever before – for contract work, subcontractors, independent service companies, tenders issued by the government for land and building leases, loans, orders, and more.
The increasing amount of paperwork makes it difficult every day to keep on top of all legal documents and contracts. Each contract should be accompanied by the paperwork before and following it – the request for proposals and the expression of interest and purchase order, invoices, and many others.
If you fail to keep your paperwork organized and track it on time, the business and you could find yourself in serious danger. They are your shields if someone attempts to cheat you or steal the property that is legally yours. Contracts are legally binding only if you can show them that they are an incorrect arrangement.
To ensure that crucial deadlines are not missed and every performance is completed promptly, it is essential that contract management team members, with the help of ContraSafe maintain awatch on the various moving parts of the contract portfolio. Here are top suggestions to ensure that your business is well-organized in its contracts repository:
Set Up anOnline Database
In the ideal scenario, the initial step in the procedure is to establish an online database for contracts. Today cloud-based solutions are cost-effective solutions that are more efficient and safer as opposed to traditional hard drives or unsafe files sharing networks. When choosing a contract management solution, it is essential to consider your company’s requirements and also any budgetary restrictions. It is recommended to select a vendor with stringent security requirements and offers unlimited users and round-the-clock 24/7 technical assistance in the event of any technical problems or issues.
Ownership
The central contract repository should identify the person who owns each document, as well as other stakeholders who have distinct roles and rights on every document. The roles could include editor’s readers, printers, encoders, mailers, and so on. However, each role has to be defined clearly.
In the absence of ownership and authorization, there is always be the possibility of breaching the chain of documents, and contracts could end up in the wrong hands, which can cause serious issues. The team should be the primary administrator of the software, however, not the individual documents that are in the system.
The software should keep detailed reports of each user’s actions, including log-in, logging out, the IP address of the user, time-stamps, actions such as documents accessed, and actions performed. This helps keep incriminating users a bay and, in the event of an incident, aid in identifying the perpetrators or determine the cause for the breach.
Maintain Selective Sharing
To avoid confusion and the risk of contract data being stolen, it is advisable to keep a selective sharing policy. To accomplish this, there must be a single contract administrator who manages the contract database. The administrator is able to grant users access to specific data and then block access to other users based on their roles or requirements to be aware of.
In certain instances, restricted access can be granted, like the revoke of printing or editing privileges. Permissions should be removed as soon as an individual no longer needs to access the contact information. By keeping a strict swath on who is in charge of what, it’s much easier to keep an orderly repository.
Document Tagging
Document tags are as important for physical filing systems as they are for digital software. Tags assist you in identifying the essential pages and sections within documents that are extended to allow you to access them quickly.
Tags can help you to standardize your document’s naming system. They also assist you in categorizing your documents, such as contracts, so that the process of storing the documents, retrieving them, and accessing them is easier for everyone involved. The proper use of tags also assists in clear and logical reporting.
- The ability to comprehend a clear, understandable, and concise tagging system can help you:
- Store, trace and seize and retrieve
- Automate the grant of permission to document access for members of the team.
- Centrally and easily control the rights of who can access which types of contracts and with the rights they have.
- Enhance efficiency and create precise audit reports.
Structuring and Segmentation
In the context of best practices in contracting specifically in regards to compliance, allowing administrators to provide different levels of access and access to particular user profiles is crucial.
Approval Workflows – Simple Compliance and Efficient
More than a central place of your contract documents, automated workflows for approval within your contract management software simplifies the process of managing contracts by swiftly moving contracts from one stage to the next. Instead of wasting 80% of your time on administrative tasks, you can concentrate on delivering value.
Since not all people send their documents to Legal (even when they ought to), The process of establishing approval workflows for templates ensures that the users or groups of users who create contracts using this template will receive the proper approvals in place right at the very beginning. There is no need to hunt down an approver or stay away from Legal.
