Contract visibility: what you need to know

Discover how businesses can gain actionable insights into their contracts in this guide to contract visibility.

What is contract visibility?

Contract visibility describes how effectively you can find, view, track, and extract important information from your contracts. 

Businesses with strong contract visibility can quickly and easily retrieve information about a contract, including where it is in its lifecycle and the contract metadata within it. 

However, businesses that lack visibility into their contracts can struggle to locate their contracts in the first place. Even when they do find their contracts, they often struggle to pinpoint the important data within the contract, or what action is required from them for it to progress. 

Why is contract visibility important?

Contract visibility is important because it gives organizations more control over their contracts. This happens in a few different ways. 

1. See where your contracts are in their lifecycle

When the business doesn’t have visibility into where a contract is in its lifecycle, it’s difficult to know what can be done to push the contract over the line. But when teams have insights into what’s blocking a contract, they can quickly take decisive action to move it along. 

For example, Juro’s unique contract timeline lets teams look back on which parts of a contract the counterparty has been editing, as well as when they last viewed the contract. This crucial information can help you to identify any friction points, revise certain terms, and clarify any points of confusion.

I can look at documents that haven’t been signed, use data to understand the bottlenecks, and help get those documents signed faster - Okechukwu Eke, Head of Legal, Moniepoint

Juro users can also view what stage all of their contracts are at in real-time with Juro’s intuitive Kanban board. That way, you can quickly visualize who is responsible for which contracts and which action is required to move them forward. 

To find out more about how businesses like yours track the status of their contracts in Juro, book a personalized demo today. 

2. Track contractual obligations and deadlines

Contract visibility also enables teams to keep tabs on important deadlines and contractual obligations. Having a clear view of your contracts can help your business to avoid unwanted auto-renewals and prevent a breach of contract from occurring, for example. 

But Juro doesn’t just record important contract dates. It can be used to remind stakeholders of these dates, too. This means that your team can maintain visibility into contracts without constantly logging into a spreadsheet to track upcoming deadlines. Instead, they’ll be automatically notified when these deadlines are emerging.

3. Gain actionable insights for future decisions

Having visibility into your contracts can even inform your contract negotiation strategy if you capture the right data points. Or, it can help to inform which clauses you should include in a contract based on how successfully these terms were received in the past. 

You can even use Juro's intuitive search functionality to instantly pull a list of all contracts with an indemnity clause, for example.

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

All of this rich collaboration data can be powerful when deciding how to tackle negotiations with counterparties for the greatest chance of success. However, without a solution like Juro in place to capture this data, it’s often lost across email chains or old Word files. 

Juro’s data-rich, collaborative platform enables legal and business teams to capture and track key data points across their contracts. To find out more, get in touch with our team. 

In short: contract visibility provides you with a wealth of information and insights that enable you to adopt more effective contract management processes. 

Yet, so many businesses still aren’t providing their teams with access to contracts and their data. This leads us to the next point: who needs visibility into contracts, and why?

Who needs visibility into contracts?

Legal teams should retain control over contracts, but it’s important for commercial teams to have visibility into contracts too. 

This is because legal rarely works in silos when it comes to contracts. Lots of teams are involved in the contracting process, and they need contract visibility to do their job properly. 

For example, sales reps rely on contracts to get their deals over the line. Knowing what’s happening during contract negotiations and how close a contract is to getting signed matters a lot when it comes to the speed of sales cycles.

Similarly, finance and ops teams rely on certain contract data, like contract value, to track the company’s revenue performance. Not having real-time visibility into this contract data can affect their ability to report on and forecast the company’s success.

This is especially true for SaaS contracts where tracking churn risks and renewals is especially important to the organization’s health. 

Why is contract visibility difficult to achieve?

Contract visibility is difficult to achieve for businesses that manage a lot of contracts but don’t have a single source of truth for these agreements. 

Often, businesses rely on up to five different tools to manage contracts from end to end. This means that contracts live in up to five different places as they progress through their lifecycle. 

It’s unclear which contracts are stored where, and who can access them. Since most contracts are stored as static files, most businesses fail to capture the data within these contracts anywhere either. 

As a result, most businesses have little control over their contracts and minimal knowledge about the actionable insights within them. 

Not only does this put them at a disadvantage compared to competitors who are already utilizing this data and making informed decisions based on it, but it also leads to greater contractual risk. 

How to improve contract visibility in your business

There are a few ways for your business to improve visibility into your contracts, but some are more effective than others. 

1. Shared drives and spreadsheets

Some businesses will request that all signed copies of a contract be uploaded to a certain shared drive, for example. They’ll then dedicate time to manually record each and every data point within a contract by adding it to a contract management spreadsheet.

There are a few limitations to this approach, though. 

Firstly, there’s no guarantee that individuals will remember to add their contracts to the shared drive, or that the copy they upload is the correct version. 

Even if they do remember, storing contracts in a shared drive like Google Drive or Dropbox doesn’t necessarily make them easier to find, particularly if you manage contracts in large quantities. 

Secondly, manually tracking your contract data requires a lot of time and effort. This time could be better spent on higher-value tasks, especially considering contract management solutions like Juro capture and track this data automatically, with no admin required. 

But the biggest problem is the amount of data lost when businesses manage their contracts in this way. There’s no opportunity to capture the changes made during negotiations, or how efficient your contract workflow is.

2. Data-rich, collaborative contract platforms

Fortunately, data-rich, collaborative platforms like Juro offer a more efficient way to improve contract visibility in 2023. They do this by centralizing contract storage and making your contracts dynamic, flexible, and fully searchable. 

Juro’s all-in-one contract platform enables legal and business teams to unlock their contract data and track contracts more effectively using the following features:

• Contracts are built as structured data. Contracts created in Juro are built as structured data by default, meaning that the contract is fully searchable from the moment of creation. 

• Secure contract repository. Juro’s secure contract repository provides a single source of truth for your contracts, with 256-bit advanced encryption and SOC2 compliance.

• Granular access controls. Juro’s granular access controls enable businesses to choose who has visibility into which contracts, and who doesn’t.  

• Automated contract reminders. Juro’s automated contract reminders provide teams with much-needed visibility into where contracts are in their lifecycle and what action is required from them. 

• Custom contract dashboards. Juro users can build fully customizable contract dashboards in seconds, allowing them to filter contracts by the data within them. 

• Contract reporting and analytics. Juro offers advanced contract reporting capabilities, enabling you to take actionable insights from your contracts and make better decisions based on these. 

But don’t just take our word for it. More than 6000 companies power their contracts with Juro. Here’s what they have to say about how Juro improved contract visibility for their business. 

Searching for documents was a time-drain before Juro. Now, I go into Juro daily, and can access all our documents through a simple search - Ulrika Leikvang, Head of Legal, Tibber

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It’s so easy to search and obtain data in Juro. If I’m searching for contracts that relate to a particular customer, for example, all I need to do is type that customer’s name in Juro to access all the relevant information -  Okechukwu Eke, Head of Legal, Moniepoint

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It’s reassuring as a legal function to know that you’ll get notified on any changes across the contract lifecycle - from edits to negotiations to signature - Sophie Salisbury, Head of Legal, Appear Here

Gain instant visibility into your contracts with Juro

Collaborative, flexible and data-rich, Juro’s all-in-one contract platform enables your team to agree and manage contracts in one unified workspace. 

Juro users can unlock their contract data and discover actionable insights from their contracts in seconds, giving the business more visibility into their agreements. 

To find out more about Juro’s data-rich contract repository, fill in the form below to book a personalized demo.