How can you optimise your contract management?

Have you ever thought about optimising and managing your contracts?

Every industry uses contracts, so therefore contract management applies to every industry: insurance, education, real estate, recruiting... 

To master contract management, you need to be able to optimise each step in the contract life cycle, from creation to expiry.

Here is some advice from Yousign to help you make the contract process more efficient at your organisation! 💪

“A contract is an agreement whereby one or more natural or legal persons undertake to give, to do or not to do something vis-à-vis someone. Legally speaking, a contract is formed from the moment an offer is accepted.”

 📍 Remember: a contract is a written agreement that two parties commit to.

Contract management is monitoring the contractual agreements within an organisation that apply to various projects. The management is flexible enough to handle any type of modification, as well as officially executing the contract.

The contract is one of the most common and cross-cutting documents in the professional world, all business sectors combined, B2B and B2C alike.

According to Fortune 1000*, a company typically manages between 20,000 and 40,000 contracts every year!

These are seriously large numbers, and a company’s risk is also very serious if a contract is managed poorly.

But most companies don’t have a properly functioning management system. Some still store and manage most of their documents as paper copies: these paper contracts can be easily forgotten or even lost...

Managing your contracts is absolutely essential, because it reduces the amount of administrative work and can speed up your processes.

As the (very old) saying goes, “prevention is better than cure”.

The same holds true for contract management: it’s better to take precautions in order to avoid future problems, such as losing a document or making a mistake in the signature process.

A digital contract management solution provides:

• security
• modernity
• risk management 
• productivity

While the contract creation phase seems simple, there could be some major structural errors. 

The contracting parties exchange several drafts before agreeing to a final version, sent via email in PDF format, and then validated via a signature. Then, this version is printed and signed by the signatory or signatories, who send it back in the post or by email (after digitising it first). 

With this long and needlessly complicated process, paper contracts often disappear into files and are quickly forgotten. This approach can also incur additional costs.

That first depends on which step in the contract life cycle you would like to optimise.

A SaaS solution (Software as a Service) is an excellent idea. The solution is made available remotely by a provider and is 100% accessible via an internet connection, so you can access your contracts anywhere, anytime! The entire process is handled externally by the service provider, hence the association often made between SaaS and the cloud.

☝️ Reminder: the cloud is a digital storage space that is accessed via the web. All you need is an Internet connection to have secure access to all of your digital content. Of course, this access is protected by password and in most cases by two-factor authentication.

HYPERLEX

A complete contract management solution offering support for the entire contract cycle: clauses, secure storage, validation workflow, etc.

ADDWORKING

A SaaS solution that secures and simplifies the management of subcontractors, service providers and freelancers..

YOUSIGN
We come in at the contract validation step, with our electronic signature solution that is compliant with the European eIDAS regulation.