Contract management—from document creation through signing to storing is a process that happens in every business, repeatedly.
Whether you’re managing a lot of high-value, lower in value, repeatable or unique contracts, it’s best to have a proper management system in place.
Why?
We have a whole list of reasons, starting from the most generic ones, narrowing down to more niche benefits, all the way to those relating to specific industries.
Read on below to learn more.
Table of contents
1. General benefits of proper contract management
2. Niche benefits of contract management
3. Industry-specific benefits of contract management
4. Manage your contracts electronically with Autenti
General benefits of proper contract management
General benefits that proper contract management brings, no matter the specific industry your business is operating in or your specific processes, are:
1. Avoiding risks & tampering with your documents
Successful contract management helps you identify any contractual risks before they can escalate.
How exactly?
Because the processes of creating, signing, and storing documents is well-thought-out and carried out in an organized manner, the risk of making mistakes in the clauses you apply or signatures you collect is very minimal.
What’s more, looking at contract management as a whole, you’ll be able to spend more time on more important issues, such as ensuring your documents are properly compliant with any legal, regulatory, or company policies.
Ensuring your contracts are properly written and fully legally binding, you can be more confident in risk management.
If you take contract management one step further and instead of just applying consistent systems and processes in place, but also add a whole contract management or even electronic signature software to the mix—you can be sure to detect any issues even faster.
Advanced contract management systems can detect unusual clauses, flag high-risk terms, and suggest mitigations before signing.
Electronic signature software on the other hand can help you verify identities of people you sign documents with, encrypts the signatures with advanced systems, seals the documents to prevent them from being tampered with, and helps you safely store them after signing.
2. Cut costs
Another quite obvious benefit of contract management is reduced spending. Your team won’t waste much time on repeatable contracts—instead dealing with them according to set out workflows in a much faster way.
Results?
Skilled talent can then focus on more high-value contracts, ensuring better earnings.
But cost savings also come from the simple fact that proper contract management prevents financial losses from missed renewals, penalties, or inefficiencies in the system as a whole.
3. Efficient workflows
Repeatable tasks, contract types, clauses, and processes can be easily automated (or at least organized) with the right contract management in place.
Whether you’ll do it with well defined contract templates, a whole contract management system, or unified workflows across the team—whole work on documentation will be much more efficient.
Standardizing the processes, but also documents themselves helps the whole team get a better understanding of the business, making decisions easier to be concluded, and the whole thing more organized.
💡 On average, inefficient contract workflows may cause delays between three to four weeks.
4. Making meaningful and fast decisions
Managing contracts is not only a way to have an organized and pleasant-to-look-at document archive—it’s also very much focused on the data you’ll finally have the time to collect and analyze.
And with time to collect and analyze data naturally come more meaningful decisions (since they’re based on factual information you’ve collected) and faster conclusions.
You’ll negotiate future deals faster, be able to choose the best options, terms, and legal clauses—something that’s impossible if chaos rules your contract “management”.
Apart from making more meaningful and faster decisions yourself, organized contracts and data throughout your documents also makes you neat and clean for any possible audit in the future.
Niche benefits of contract management
Beyond the obvious advantages like efficiency, cut costs, or compliance with regulations, contract management offers several niche benefits that can give businesses a strategic edge.
Here are the ones we want to highlight.
5. Protecting your reputation
Contract management helps PR teams by ensuring clear agreements with media partners, influencers, and agencies, so messaging stays consistent and on-brand.
But it’s not just ensuring proper contact with the media, it’s also protecting a company's reputation with NDAs, crisis management clauses, and brand usage guidelines.
Contracts can include clauses addressing disputes, legal liability, and termination rights to prevent associations that may harm brand reputation.
As a famous saying goes, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
6. Improving vendor & supplier relationships
Clear contracts set expectations on deliverables, payment terms, and service levels, reducing misunderstandings and conflicts with any vendor & supplier, or any other business relationships for that matter.
It also helps resolve disputes efficiently by outlining procedures for handling issues before they escalate.
Overall, it builds trust, ensures accountability, and keeps partnerships running smoothly.
7. Potential readiness for mergers & acquisitions
Having organized, accessible contracts speeds up due diligence in mergers and acquisitions, making your company more attractive to buyers or investors.
If you’re considering merging or even selling your company, having a clean contract management system can be a blessing in such a scenario.
Industry-specific benefits of contract management
Now, let’s review more industry-specific benefits of contract management on three examples: HR, SaaS, and ecommerce—so that the benefits feel more tangible.
We’ll also provide real-life business examples where successful contract management helped tremendously to really seal the deal.
HR
Besides benefiting from the general advantages that contract management brings—such as saved time, cut costs, or more efficient processes—the brand or departments of HR in various businesses can also note better:
8. Employee lifecycle tracking
Contract management can speed up or even automate contract renewals, probationary periods, and performance-based clauses.
But as we mentioned earlier, having organized documentation also gives you the time to properly analyze it and spot data trends.
All this helps with properly tracking the employee lifecycle, instead of relying on gut feeling or LinkedIn-provided average employee tenure.
9. Remote & freelance worker compliance
HR takes care of managing internal employees, just as much as working with agencies, freelancers, or remote workers in general.
Proper contract management ensures adherence to international labor laws, NDAs, and intellectual property agreements.
But it also helps create smooth and predictable workflows for every employment or coworking scenario, no matter the other party’s location or form of collaboration.
Real-life example
Bank Millennium—a leading financial institution in Poland, has implemented digital HR solutions in response to the shift towards remote and hybrid working.
How did they do that exactly?
They used Autenti—an electronic signature software platform that makes it easy to sign and store documents online. It’s particularly useful for HR branches of any business, including those that sign a lot of contracts on a remote basis.
Example HR documents Bank Millennium signs online thanks to Autenti are preliminary contracts, employment contracts, annexes, training agreements, fuel card contracts, and decisions regarding the social fund.
Turning to digital signature solutions allowed Bank Millennium to sign documents in just a few minutes, cutting the time needed for HR processes.
“Signing documents now takes just a few minutes, which significantly shortens HR processes. It also optimises our involvement and minimises the risk that the recipient will not receive the document on time or at the specified address. Additionally, we save on courier costs, which were previously used to deliver documents. The environmental aspect is also noteworthy - there is no need to print paper documents, store them, or archive them,”
Monika Ruraż-Lipińska, Head of the HR Team at Bank Millennium
SaaS
In turn, some more niche benefits that the SaaS industry enjoys from implementing effective contract management strategy are:
10. Dynamic pricing & Terms of Service
Handling contract management the right way allows SaaS businesses to easily adjust their often dynamic pricing with the contracts they manage, especially speaking of Terms of Service.
Offering a SaaS solution, often to international users, requires complying with many regulations, which may become difficult—especially if your pricing or terms of service tend to evolve quite often.
Ready-made contract templates, clauses, and organized workflows help tremendously in naturally chaotic environments.
11. Data privacy & security compliance
SaaS businesses offering tools that involve a lot of users and often their data have to fully comply with multiple security regulations and nail their data privacy efforts.
Ensures GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2, ISO, or any other regulation compliance easily across contracts by taking the time to fix your contract management.
12. Licensing & IP protection
Finally, well-handled contract management can also be of great help in streamlining software licensing terms to prevent unauthorized usage and intellectual property disputes.
This heavily connects with the security issue, but also the fact of simply having ready-made clauses and templates for various scenarios.
Real-life example
Brand24—a SaaS tool specialising in internet monitoring that helps brands track and analyse online mentions, turned to Autenti to digitize their contract signing and improve their internal operations.
Before implementing Autenti into their workflows, processes were slow, often delayed due to the need to send physical documents between three locations across Poland.
„With Autenti, just two clicks are enough to send a document, and our back office always has a copy stored on the server”
Mikołaj Winkiel, Chief Evangelist at Brand24
Autenti significantly sped up Brand24’s document workflows, enabling teams to collaborate efficiently, no matter their location.
But Autenti also helped Brand24 standardise external processes, even when working with large corporations that previously preferred traditional signatures—helping fix the contract management across teams and collaborations.
Ecommerce
Last, but certainly not least, the benefits that stick out particularly for ecommerce businesses that manage their contracts in an organized and efficient way are:
13. Marketplace & dropshipping agreements
Working in ecommerce is often tied to collaboration with third-party vendors, even internationally.
This requires proper legal protection in multi-seller marketplaces, which can be done with organized contract management. By managing terms with third-party vendors, you can be safe that any and all operations will go smoothly.
14. Refund & chargeback policy optimization
A big part of selling ecommerce products is the issue of refunds and chargebacks.
With contract management, you can standardize the customer refund policies to reduce disputes and possible financial losses.
15. Affiliate & influencer contract automation
Implementing contract management in the brand of ecommerce can also help with any affiliate or influencer collaborations.
You can automate payment schedules, deliverables, and compliance tracking for brand collaborations. But also ensure security with NDAs in place, enhance time management on repeatable contracts with e-signatures, and more.
Real-life example
TZMO—a global producer and supplier of medical, hygiene, and cosmetic products, employing nearly 9,000 people and operating across nearly 60 companies, implemented Autenti to help manage the mountain of documents they manage.
As a result, they reduced contract processing times up to 90%, now signing documents in 30 hours or less. Before working with Autenti, employees had to print the documents, gather the signatures, and send them by courier, which extended processing times heavily.
Now, everything happens online, which helped drop the average time to complete a document from two weeks (for local contracts) or 2-3 months (for international contracts) to around 30 hours. With the best turnaround times of just a few hours per document.
“Automation has freed up time for essential activities like sales, rather than handling paper documentation, which involved printing, dispatching, scanning, receiving, and incurring logistics costs for courier and postal services.”
Dr Paweł Ochrymiuk, Corporate Governance and Legal Manager at TZMO
Manage your contracts electronically with Autenti
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