Small business contract management: software, best practices, and more

Every company manages contracts, just at different scales.

Whether you're an enterprise partnering with hundreds of suppliers, or a startup onboarding their first freelancer, how you manage these contracts matters.

Without the right tools and processes in place, contracts become a bottleneck to growth, slowing down business-critical processes like customer acquisition and hiring.

Small businesses can't afford for these risks to materialize, so it's important for them to have a reliable contract management process or solution in place. That's where we can help.

The state of contract management for small businesses today

Contracts formalize every transaction you make, every customer you win, and every new hire you bring into your team.

The problem is, small businesses have a habit of carrying out transactions and agreements informally to reduce cost, time, and burdens on resources.

Perhaps they don't have the infrastructure or templates in place yet, or there's no one to take ownership of these legal agreements. Without that accountability, it's easy to get complacent.

However, the risks associated with conducting business without contracts are huge, especially for businesses that are just starting out.

For example, it's estimated that 84 per cent of small businesses have fallen victim to late payments, with the amount owed to SMEs in late payments sitting around £14bn and impacting a third of these companies.

As many small businesses know all too well, cash flow is critical to keeping your business afloat, and delayed payments can jeopardize your success, or worse, cause a small business to fall into debt.

Contracts enable you to enforce your payment terms and protect your assets by putting legal provisions in place.

But simply having contracts in place is one thing. Managing those agreements effectively is another.

Who manages small business contracts?

In most small businesses, an in-house lawyer will typically ‘own’ the contract process. However, if your business is still in its infancy, you may find yourself without a legal department, in which case contract management duties will usually fall to the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Operating Officer, or even the CEO.

This means that important contracts will often be passed back and forth between different individuals and departments, many of whom will not have a legal background or any experience managing contracts.

This is another reason why contract management systems are so useful for SMEs, as they make the contract process more collaborative, accessible, and easy to use - even without experience.

How to unlock effective contract management as a small business

An effective contract management process can transform the way your business operates, reducing the time wasted on routine contract admin and empowering you to focus on the tasks that really move the needle for your growth.

To help you unlock this, let's explore a few best practices and opportunities you should be taking advantage of - if you aren't already.

1. Centralize records and storage

Leasing a generously sized office space is often out of the question for SMEs, which makes storing hard copies of contracts in one central location a real challenge. What’s more, many businesses have moved towards a paperless office anyway in a bid to keep mess and fuss to a minimum.

Contract management software like Juro offers a fast and efficient way to store contracts securely. Unlike physical storage solutions which are vulnerable to loss and destruction, contract management solutions store documents indefinitely, and behind multi-layer passwords.  

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With Juro, you can organize and query your contract data in real time. Contracts are built as structured data and stored in a secure contract repository where you can review all of this data in one place by building a custom contract dashboard.

This makes it significantly easier to audit contracts and stay compliant with data protection rules and regulations. It also means you spend less of your valuable time searching high and low for specific agreements ahead of a termination or renewal. To find out more, hit the button below to see Juro in action.

2. Automate contract creation

Drafting each and every contract from scratch simply isn't feasible for most small businesses, especially as contract volumes scale ahead of headcount.

Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to reduce this manual admin work and generate contracts faster, like setting up contract templates that serve as a strong starting point.

Although this can be set up across Micrsosoft Word and shared drives, it's safer and more efficient to leverage a contract management solution like Juro where these templates are automated.

With Juro, users can generate contracts in just a few clicks, either by pulling data in from other business systems, like a CRM, or by completing a simple Q&A form. This eliminates the need to manually populate template fields and empowers commercial teams to self-serve with confidence.

3. Streamline collaboration and negotiation

There is an increased need for collaboration within small businesses. With low numbers of staff, people will naturally be expected to chip in where they can. Even when your business begins to scale, there will always be a need for collaboration across departments, as contracts affect all business areas.

This can be messy when requests are shared and actioned across different communication platforms and document versions. It's far easier when you facilitate real-time collaboration on documents through a solution like Google Docs or Juro.

For example, Juro enables users to collaborate on and negotiate contracts in real time. They can add comments, redlines and suggestions, which counterparties or colleagues can respond to either in a comment thread or by approving or rejecting their proposal.

This streamlines the discussion, helping you reach an agreement faster.

4. Set clear roles and responsibilities for approval and signing

It's not unusual for the roles and responsibilities of small business employees to blur, especially when it comes to cross-functional documents like contracts. But if you want contracts to progress, someone needs to take ownership of them.

This can be as simple as listing authorized signatories in a playbook of some sort, or setting up automated approval workflows in a platform like Juro to make sure risky terms don't fall through the cracks for high-value agreements.

The more granular this guidance is, the better. It eliminates confusion and ensures contract-related tasks don't disappear into the abyss waiting for someone to action them.

How to evaluate contract management software as a small business

The needs of a small business are extremely different to those of an enterprise organization, and it’s important for vendors and buyers alike to recognize these key distinctions.

Affordability

Budgets are naturally tighter for smaller companies, and it's even harder to fight for budget allocation when it comes to new tech for unproven processes. As a result, small businesses need contract management solutions that offer competitive pricing and flexibility that means they only pay for what they use - no more. 

Why small businesses choose Juro

That’s why we allow our users to build a package that works for them, with plans that suit businesses of all sizes and needs. We believe you should only pay for what you use, so our pricing plans are based on your contract volumes and on the complexity of any integrations you might need.

Implementation

Unlike enterprise businesses that can invest headcount into setting up and configuring a contract tool, small businesses are often already stretched and need a system that's easy to implement. 

You might have heard about the nightmare implementations that are typical of heavyweight, legacy contract lifecycle management systems. As a small business, you need to be wary about how much of the onboarding process will rest on your shoulders. 

We speak about this a lot in our guide to an effective CLM demo: don’t be afraid to ask exactly what you’ll be responsible for during an implementation, and even more importantly, how long you can expect it to take. 

Why small businesses choose Juro

Some complex and highly customizable systems designed for large companies can average between six to twelve months.

Juro’s implementation averages just under a month, and we’re the top-rated platform for ease and quality of onboarding. 

Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what our customers say about our onboarding:

“We’re a dynamic organization and didn’t want to wait 24 to 36 months to get value from a solution. We ran minimal training sessions and teams were using Juro almost immediately” - Maryke Richards, Senior Legal Counsel at Takealot

“The overall onboarding process was stress-free, intuitive, and extremely responsive. We had a functional suite of up to 50 templates ready within weeks” - Ryan Zahrai, Head of Legal, Eucalyptus

Counterparty experience

The unique thing about contract tools is that they aren’t reserved for internal teams. Contract management solutions will also be used by the businesses you’re entering into new relationships with, like customers. This is known as the counterparty experience.

A positive counterparty experience is paramount for smaller companies competing with bigger fish for new business. And a contract management system has the potential to make or break that. 

A sleek and professional contracting experience is an excellent way to present yourselves as a trusted and mature provider, despite your size. A clunky, unintuitive one will have the opposite effect.

Why small businesses choose Juro

Counterparty experience is something we think a lot about at Juro, and we’re proud to know that 97 per cent of contracts initiated in Juro are ultimately executed in Juro. In other words, our customers aren’t the only ones enjoying Juro, their customers are too. 

If you’re interested in finding out more, check out this guide to counterparty experience.

Real, quantifiable value 

It’s easy for under-performing or unadopted platforms to fall under the radar at a large business, especially if the budget has already been allocated for that solution and owners are never chased about verifying the value that tool delivers.. 

That’s not the case for small businesses with fewer resources and an intense pressure to do more with less. Small business contract management software needs to deliver value, and fast. And rightly so. 

You want a contract management solution that actually saves you time and money. In the context of contracts, that value can be quantified in a few ways:

• Faster time-to-sign: How much shorter is the time it takes to get a contract over the line after implementing the tool? Or, in other words, how long does it take to progress a contract from creation to signed. 
• Fewer missed renewals: How much capital has the business saved by preventing costly auto-renewals because you’re able to capture and respond to them ahead of time?
• Time saved across the team: How much time does your legal and commercial team save by automating routine contract admin tasks, and what can they do with that time instead?

These are all key contract management metrics your small business will be expected to measure success against when you implement a contract management system, so you should proactively find out how the vendors you’re looking at will deliver against these before you put your name on that dotted line. 

Why small businesses choose Juro

By investing in your success using Juro, we also invest in our own. And we know that our customers are receiving quantifiable value from the platform, because they share feedback like this with us:

“Without Juro, we’d probably have to hire at least another full-time employee” 

“We’ve reduced legal contract reviews by 88 per cent with Juro”

“We send contracts for signing two times faster with Juro”

“The time I spend negotiating contracts has dropped by 75 per cent thanks to Juro”

Juro: the best small business contract management software

Juro's AI-enabled contract automation platform enables legal & business teams to create, execute & manage 10x faster than traditional tools, protecting your time for higher-impact initiatives.

The end-to-end platform powers the entire contract lifecycle from initiation through to renewal all within a secure, browser-native environment.

Juro works with fast-scaling businesses like Trustpilot, Soundcloud and WeWork to streamline contract workflow and gain better insight into contract data, but we also worth with smaller teams looking to do more with less.

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Unlike heavyweight, legacy contract tools, Juro is easy to use and implement, with the highest adoption of any CLM, according to G2. This makes it perfect for small teams that don't have the time or resources to support with a long and expensive implementation.

To find out how Juro can enable you to reduce the time your small business spends on contracts by 90 per cent, fill in the form below.