How Finance Contract Management Can Help Your Team
Ineffective and inefficient finance contract management can result in lost revenue. Even worse, it can expose your organization to financial risk in the form of missed obligations, unintended renewals, and other unnecessary costs and lost opportunities. That’s why it’s important for finance and accounting teams to play an active role not only in the contract review and approval process but also in the overall contract lifecycle management.
Unfortunately, many organizations still manage contracts using manual and traditional methods such as email, shared folders, spreadsheets, and even filing cabinets. This creates a lot of challenges for finance and accounting departments when trying to get answers to key questions associated with maximizing revenues and managing costs with their contractual agreements.
“When are all of our contracts for this service up for renewal?”
“What products and services are associated with these contracts?”
“What vendors missed an obligation? What were the penalties?”
“How are contracts for this service performing?”
“What line items have we fulfilled against this agreement?”
It’s critical that finance and accounting teams modernize and digitize their contract lifecycle management with contract management software. It not only provides answers to these questions and more, it also helps streamline and automate all their organization’s contracting processes.
Download A CFO’s Guide to Successful Contract Management to learn more.
With contract management software, finance teams can help drive profitability by identifying lost revenue, cost-saving opportunities, improving compliance, and reconciling and enforcing terms and obligations. Here are some specific ways that Contract Logix’s intelligent contract management platform makes this possible.
“Contract management software helps finance teams drive profitability, improve compliance, and enforce obligations.”
Easily find unpaid revenue, cost-savings, and underperforming services
Contract Logix’s intelligent contract management software provides intuitive and graphical dashboards and customizable reports. All your contract data such as dates, contacts, organizations, line items, clauses, etc. is structured and easily searchable and reportable to help deliver actionable business insights into the performance and terms of your contracts.
Avoid penalties for missed milestones and terms
The platform gives finance and accounting teams the ability to track and visualize the stage and status of every agreement in your process. You can easily manage addendums, amendments, and terminations and quickly and accurately reference which version of the agreement is the latest executed and which terms are current. This saves time and reduces risk and confusion by ensuring only the latest version is being used.
Never miss renewals, automatic rollovers, or revenue opportunities
The software lets you easily set automated alerts, notifications, and calendar reminders for dates and activities associated with your contracts so that you never miss an obligation. You select if you want alerts to be sent before, on, and/or after key dates, how often they should be sent, and in what format such as email, in-system, or both. Not only does this mitigate risks, it also increases staff efficiency. You can also set alert rules that you define at the system-level, so no manual intervention is required.
Ensure accounting compliance by automatically tracking key dates and terms and keeping an accurate record for audit purposes.
Since all your contracts are stored in the software’s cloud-based central repository, your contract data is quickly yet securely accessible and auditable by your team. In addition, all activities associated with a contract including addendums, amendments, terminations, or other changes are tracked and reportable. You can also create contracts directly in the system using preapproved clause and template libraries. This ensures that only compliant language and formats are used, and it saves time. All edits to documents can be done in the platform to keep an accurate record of changes during the negotiation and review process. And finally, electronic signature support increases the speed and security of executing agreements. Whether you’re trying to ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, HITECH, or some other regulatory requirement, contract management software makes it a lot easier.
Finance Contract Management Takeaway
Effective finance contract management is a key opportunity for finance and accounting teams to uncover revenue opportunities, reduce costs, ensure compliance, and ultimately mitigate financial risks. That’s why adoption of contract management software should be a priority for organizations of all sizes and industries. It’s an easy and cost-effective way of improving the top and bottom line of any business. Schedule a live demo and see how it can help you.