Contract dashboards: the ultimate guide

It’s 2022 and businesses are more data-driven than ever before. Yet, unfortunately, many businesses still aren’t capturing contract data as effectively as they could be. Contracts remain hard to find, hard to track and almost impossible to review in large quantities. 

Creating a contract dashboard can help make it easier to manage contracts and their key metrics. Find out more in this guide.

What is a contract dashboard?

A contract dashboard is a tool used to collate and present all important information about your contracts in a digestible and visual format. They typically present a brief overview of how your contracts are performing, how you’re tracking against legal KPIs, and other critical contract data. 

The purpose of a contract dashboard is to provide legal and business teams with a clear overview of how effectively contracts are being managed, and to enable users to quickly extract and understand this data without needing to conduct their own analysis. 

This is achieved by condensing otherwise complex contract insights into graphs and making it easy for users to visualize performance against certain contract metrics.

What does a contract dashboard look like?

Since most contract dashboards are customizable, most contract dashboards will vary in appearance. There are also different types of contract dashboards. 

For example, some contract dashboards will be used to compile and filter the data contained within contracts. This is achieved by filtering contracts based on their smartfield values (e.g effective dates, contract types, contract status and other more). In Juro, this is called ‘table views’.

This type of contract dashboard is particularly useful when conducting a contract audit, or tracking a contract’s progress. Juro’s customizable contract dashboard enables users to quickly and efficiently create separate dashboards for different contract types, owners and clients, making it easy to review specific contract data for different contract collections. 

Meanwhile, other contract dashboards may be used to track the progress of business contracts at scale. This gives users an overview of the status of different contracts, helping them recognize when action is needed for specific contracts.

In Juro, this data is captured within a Kanban style dashboard which makes it easy for teams to visualize exactly which contract lifecycle stage agreements are stuck at. One of the biggest advantages of using Juro is that this dashboard is updated automatically as contracts progress within the platform, meaning there’s no contract administration or manual maintenance required for these dashboards.

There are also contract dashboards designed for reporting and analytics. This type of contract dashboard view is an effective way to visualize how many contracts are created, what types of contracts are being created and how many contracts are at each stage of the contract’s lifecycle.

A contract dashboard is a fantastic tool for noticing trends, patterns and identifying potential risks within your contract workflow. The insights can then be used to prompt more detailed and granular contract analysis. 

Benefits of using a contract dashboard

Now that we know what a contract dashboard is and what it looks like, it’s worth considering whether or not you actually need one. 

The impact of having a contract dashboard may be trivial for small businesses managing just a few contracts, but for businesses that are scaling rapidly or managing an increasing number of contracts, having a contract dashboard in place is essential to growing quickly and without risk. 

In fact, there are plenty of benefits of using a contract management dashboard. We’ve listed a few of them below. 

1. Enhanced visibility into contracts

One of the biggest benefits of using a contract dashboard is that it makes contract data far more accessible for the entire business. Traditionally, there was no transparency around contracts and their data throughout the business, and this made it difficult for teams to collaborate on contracts. 

Business teams are usually deterred by the legal jargon within contracts, so reviewing contracts and extracting data from them tends to be a chore. However, automatically capturing the data contained within a contract and presenting this in an easy to understand table or chart, business teams can access contract data in seconds. This then empowers commercial teams to self-serve on contracts, rather than requiring constant oversight from legal.  

2. Easy to track progress against KPIs

Adopting a contract dashboard is also an effective way to track progress against legal and company KPIs. 

This is because contract management dashboards often capture valuable information, like the average value of contracts, the sum of contracts managed, how long contracts take to review, and how much is lost on missed contract renewals, for example. 

Without a dashboard in place, legal and business teams would need to search high and low for this information every time they wanted to track their performance. If companies truly want to be performance and data-driven, they should enable their teams with the right software to do that. Contract management software is an effective tool for this. 

3. Track the progress of contracts with ease 

Distinct from when contracts are scattered across shared drives and email inboxes, a contract management dashboard makes it quick and easy for contract owners and senior stakeholders to monitor the progress of large contract quantities at once. 

In a manual contract workflow, this would require updating a contract management spreadsheet every time a contract progresses. This is tedious and time consuming. However, it also makes it difficult to visualize exactly how many contracts require action and at what stage. 

By contrast, Juro users can monitor the progress of large contract volumes at a glance thanks to the platform’s kanban style dashboard and automated contract tracking.

4. Recognize contract blockers 

Contract dashboards can be used to help teams visualize exactly where contracts are sitting for the longest during their lifecycle. For instance, if large volumes of contracts are piling up at the contract approval stage, it’s likely that the existing process used for managing approvals isn’t working, and the dashboard can serve as clear evidence for this. 

Similarly, if certain types of contracts are consistently being held up at the negotiation phase, it could be that the terms within them need softening. By enabling legal and business teams to visualize the contract workflow and patterns within it, a contract dashboard can deliver key insights to stakeholders and drive improvements to existing processes. 

How to create a contract dashboard

Unless you’re keen on the idea of manually updating the values within a contract dashboard, you’ll want a way to push data from your contracts and into these dashboards automatically. The best way to do this is by implementing a contract automation tool like Juro. 

When contracts are created in Juro, they’re built as structured data and made fully searchable (thanks to OCR). This means that all of the important contract values are captured within contract smart fields and can be pulled directly into fully customizable contract management dashboards. 

Check out the video below to find out exactly how this works in Juro. 

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As you can see, contract dashboards can be created in seconds using Juro's intuitive filtering tools. They’re also fully automated and dynamic, meaning that the data you see is always accurate and up to date. 

Not to mention that users can create different workspaces within the platform, meaning they have total control over which contract dashboards are visible throughout the business, and they can even export the dashboard’s contents into a CSV for external sharing. 

This makes creating a contract dashboard in Juro a secure and frictionless way to capture, view and share the contract highlights that matter most for your business. 

Need help tracking contracts?

To find out more about how Juro can help your business to manage contracts end-to-end and capture contract data effectively, fill in the form below.