5 benefits of contract management software

 Discover the benefits of contract management software for forward-thinking businesses in 2024. 

What is contract management software?

Contract management software, often referred to as contract lifecycle management software (CLM), enables organizations to streamline contract workflows end-to-end, from contract creation and signature to tracking and storing contracts. 

CLM deals with every aspect of the contract lifecycle, as opposed to point solutions, which focus on just one aspect of contact management. 

Why use contract management software?

Contract management is essential for any business, as most organizations rely on contracts. However, manual contract workflows are difficult to track and manage, especially as a business begins to scale.

That’s where contract management software comes in, cutting out the noise and giving visibility throughout the contract lifecycle, for safer, faster contracting. But what are the real, tangible benefits of using contract management software? Let’s take a look. 

What are the benefits of contract management software?

1. Greater visibility into contracts 

Contracts are essential to the everyday running of organizations, but they’re useless to anybody if you don’t have visibility into them. Contract visibility describes how effectively you can view, find, track, and extract key information from your contracts.

Gaining insight into your contracts gives organizations more control over their contracts in a variety of ways, including:

• Seeing which stage contracts are at in their lifecycle. If you can’t see what’s blocking a contract from signature, how can you fix it? Juro’s timeline feature gives users insight into which parts of a contract the counterparty has been editing as well as when they last viewed it. 

This information could be crucial in helping you to identify a friction point or revise a certain term that gets the contract over the line. Check out how Juro customer Moniepoint benefitted from greater contract visibility below: 

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• Tracking contractual obligations and deadlines. Contract management software also gives you greater visibility into important deadlines and contractual obligations. This means you can avoid missing auto-renewals or prevent an accidental breach of contract from occurring with a platform like Juro.
  
  
• Showing actionable insights. Another big win that comes from greater contract visibility is that it can inform how you negotiate contracts. For example, it could help you determine which clauses you should include in a contract based on how successfully terms were received in the past.
  
  Or, as Curve’s HR team  found, you can even shorten the time-to-sign:

With Juro we can accurately measure how long it takes to reach signature, and we can address this on an individual basis - Karolina Plaskaty, HR Business Partner, Curve

2. Approve contracts faster

Another clear benefit of adopting contract management software is an improved contract workflow and as a result, a faster approval process. This is especially important for lawyers in smaller and early-stage businesses. 

There are numerous additional benefits to adopting an automated contract workflow and speeding up the approval process, let’s explore some: 

• Improved collaboration. Legal has to work with lots of other teams, although they don’t always welcome legal input with open arms! Juro’s AI-enabled environment allows users to collaborate on contracts without the back and forth between redlines and email, reducing friction.
  
  
• More control. Greater speed doesn’t necessarily mean less control. In fact, with Juro, it can mean more. Keep both visibility and control over contracts as they grow, see when counterparties view a contract, and set automatic reminders for key dates. Scale your contracting process - but do it safely.

Thanks to Juro the legal team has complete control of and visibility over what's being signed - Frances Contreras, Legal Operations Manager, WeWork

• Enhanced security. Not only does contract management software improve the speed of your contract workflow, but it also makes them more secure. Juro is SOC-2 compliant and encrypted using 256-bit advanced encryption standard (AES). You can find out more about contract security and Juro.

Juro enables legal and business teams to agree contracts 10x faster than traditional tools. To find out how, hit the button below.

3. Manage risk effectively

Risk is a significant factor for any business and when it comes to contracts, this could be categorized as legal, financial, reputational, or security risk. Whichever kind of contract risk it is, it can be controlled and reduced with the correct contract management software. 

For example, one of the most significant contract risks for SaaS businesses is missed renewals. This could be you missing the renewal or a counterparty doing the same - but don’t worry, this is avoidable! Juro allows you to set up contract renewal reminders so you never miss a key date again.  

This would help mitigate risk as it ensures that a contract is only renewed when you want it to be, which is also important for financial accuracy and forecasting. 

You can also limit contract risk using contract management software, like Juro, by establishing contract approval workflows. Juro enables you to set approval orders at a template level or when certain conditions are met within the contract, like if the contract is over a certain value threshold.

4. More control over contracts 

Another benefit of this software is that it gives you more control over your contract portfolio.  

For example, if you’ve implemented a contract management system you’re able to:

• Monitoring your contractual obligations more closely 
• Making it easier to conduct contract audits
• Measuring progress against legal KPIs
• Quickly and easily identifing blockers within the contract lifecycle

Each of these provides actionable insights into the agreements you’re working with every day and improves the overall efficiency of your contract management process. 

Juro allows us to track everything, so contract negotiations, notifications, comms with the counterparty, and so on, are all captured in one place - Victoria Sörving, Chief Legal Officer, Funnel

This type of control simply isn’t possible when your contracts are siloed. Contract management software allows you to create, edit, and store your contracts in one unified space, giving you control over the whole contract workflow. 

5. Enable teams to self-serve on contracts

Enabling business teams to self-serve on contract creation is a big time saver for time-crunched legal teams and an obvious benefit.  Contract management software like Juro allows legal to standardize the workflows of the teams they enable so that contracts are created safely and efficiently.

This leads to:

• Fewer data-entry errors
• Minimized back and forth when a new contract is created
• Zero legal touchpoints on simple contracts like NDAs
• Better relationships between legal and the teams that they enable

Self-serve contracts enable lean legal teams to do a lot with less, as departments can negotiate and send out contracts for signing without needing significant legal time.

Zeno Capucci from Docplanner explores this in more detail in this blog post. 

Find out more

Still wondering if contract management software is the right fit for you? Check out these resources:

• Best contract management software in 2024
  
  
• Contract automation: software, processes and benefits
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• How to improve your contract management process

Or to explore how contract management software works for different industries, check out the guides below.

• Contract management for non-profit
  
  
• Contract management for education
  
  
• Contract management for insurance
  
  
• Contract management for government
  
  
• Contract management for construction
  
  
• Contract management for healthcare
  
  
• Contract management for real estate