Eliminate Missed Contract Obligations with Automated Alert Rules
Keeping track of contractual obligations can be a real business challenge with the potential for severe consequences if not handled properly. Missing key dates, commitments, milestones, or other obligations can create in financial, legal, and brand risks. Imagine missing the deadline for terminating a contract with an autorenewal that you are now stuck in for another year. Or, perhaps your organization becomes eligible for a larger discount on a contract with vendor once you meet a certain milestone that you failed to track? These are real world scenarios that we hear from prospects all the time and situations that can be completely eliminate missed contract obligations with the use of our contract management software.
With Contract Logix, keeping track of all your contractual commitments is extremely simple, accurate, and efficient. Our data-driven CLM platform supports automated alert rules that are easy to set up and manage and very effective at helping you eliminate missed contract obligations.
Let’s look at a specific example to demonstrate the ease and effectiveness of tracking contract obligations.
Setting Up an Alert Rule
Perhaps your organization requires all contracts to be reviewed 60-days before their expiration date. This way, the appropriate people in the organization have plenty of time to determine if that contract will be renewed. If it’s a buy-side agreement, you might want to evaluate the vendor performance and decide if this purchasing activity should continue or go out to bid with other vendors. Or, if it’s a sell-side activity, you may need to evaluate the customer relationship and determine if there is any risk of termination or perhaps an opportunity for expansion. Either way, you want to make sure the team is notified 60-days ahead of the expiration date to begin their due diligence.
To automate this process in Contract Logix, simply enter the settings page and select Alert Rules from the left side menu. Here you can see and modify all your existing alerts as well as create New Alerts. For this example, we will name the alert Contract Expiration Reminder so we know what it’s about and we can locate it when needed.
The alert will apply to all contracts, unless you choose a specific contract type such as a Master Services Agreement. You then select what the alert is based on, such as expiration date, and when you want the alert to trigger. If “on”, the alert will be sent on that date, if you choose “before” or “after”, simply add the number of days which, in this example, will be 60 days prior to the expiration.
The recurrence allows you to select how often the alert is sent, if you choose none, then the alert goes out once. You can also pick other frequencies if you want the alert to be sent multiple times to ensure the obligation isn’t missed.
For Notification Method (i.e. how will people be sent the alert), the options are Email, In System, or Both. If an option with email is selected, you can use an existing email template, or you can turn that off and write a new email. And by turning on the Edit Email, you can edit an existing email template on a one-off basis without permanently changing the template for future use.
Our next step is to choose who you want to be notified. You can add a known contact in the system like the contract owner or add a new email address. You can also notify multiple people if necessary. Finally, you can select whether you want this alert to trigger an automated workflow such as kicking off a process for an annual vendor review. This is a great way to not only automate the alert, but also automate the process for what is supposed to happen once the reminder date is met.
Now, after verifying everything is correct, you are ready to save the alert and start eliminating missed dates, deadlines, and other obligations!
Takeaway
With contract management software from Contract Logix, you can completely eliminate missed contract obligations. With just a few clicks of a mouse, this can save your business a significant amount of money and headaches. If you’re interested in seeing how Contract Logix can help your business eliminate missed obligations, please schedule a contract management demo today!