Contract management reporting: how to improve the process, not just the numbers

Every contract tells a story.

Who agreed to what, when, and under which terms. But when it’s time to report on those contracts, that story often gets lost in spreadsheets, emails, and last-minute scrambles.

For teams juggling dozens (or hundreds) of contracts, reporting is essential. Contract management reporting allows you to keep potential risks in check (risk management), renewals on time, and stakeholders aligned.

Yet the process behind it is often messy, with data spread across systems, delays due to absences, and reports already outdated when they land.

According to a World Commerce & Contracting study, poor contract management practices—including inefficient contract reporting—can cost businesses up to 9% of annual revenue.

In this article, we’ll focus on improving the reporting processes themselves.

Because it’s not just about key metrics and insights (contract cycle time, contract value, renewal rate, contract termination rate, number of new contracts, average contract-drafting time, whatever it is, you can read about major contract KPIs and what to track here.)

The current state of contract reporting

Before we get to improving the process of contract reporting, we have to be able to spot the symptoms of messy reporting first.

See if any of the following sound familiar to you.

Fragmented tools and workflows

In many organizations, contract data lives everywhere and nowhere at the same time. 

For example, without proper reporting, the sales team tracks expiration dates in a spreadsheet. Procurement logs risk clauses in a separate tool. Marketing keeps PDF versions of contracts buried in a shared drive (only accessible to their team).

What does that give us?

A patchwork of systems that don’t talk to each other, making even simple questions, like “Which contracts are up for renewal next quarter?”, painfully slow to answer.

Manual data gathering and formatting

Without a centralized system, reporting often becomes a manual scavenger hunt.

Someone has to dig through folders, match documents with terms, cross-check dates, then build the report from scratch—every time.

There’s little consistency and lots of room for error. And once the report is finally built, it’s already a little out of date.

Email-driven reviews and feedback loops

Reviewing the report and iterating can also be a painful part of the whole process.

Many teams default to long email threads, version confusion, and scattered feedback.

A comment gets buried, a version gets overwritten, and suddenly no one’s sure which file is the “real” report. It’s a slow, frustrating process that eats into the very efficiency the report is supposed to promote.

Lack of standardization across departments or contract types

Legal wants to see risk terms. Finance cares about value. Procurement needs vendor compliance. Stakeholders want to see the ROI.

Without a standardized format or shared framework for reports (not just contract types in general), each department might be reporting in their own way—making it harder to share insights, compare data, or make decisions.

So, what does “efficient” mean in contract reporting?

Knowing where contract reporting usually suffers, let’s establish another crucial part: the benchmarks. What is “good” or “efficient” contract reporting?

Effective contract management reporting means more than getting a report out the door quickly. It means creating a process that’s sustainable, clear, and adaptable, no matter how many contracts or departments are involved.

In practice, that means your reports should be:

• Timely: reports should show up when they’re needed—not a week late, and not in a rush the night before a board meeting. Whether it’s quarterly summaries or monthly compliance checks, timing matters. An efficient process ensures reporting happens on schedule, and without fire drills or last-minute “dang, I forgot to make a report again!”
  
  
• Repeatable: you shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel every time. A good reporting process is like a recipe, with consistent ingredients, clear steps, predictable outcomes. A recipe that every employee and department can follow. A recipe that gives the same outcome, every time, no matter who follows it. That way, whether it’s Alice from Legal or David from Procurement running the report, the result looks the same.
  
  
• Scalable: what works for ten contracts should still work for a hundred. Efficient reporting processes are built with growth in mind, automating steps where possible, reducing dependencies on single people or departments, and using tools that don’t break under volume.
  
  
• Easy to digest: lastly, a report is only useful if people can understand it. That means cutting the noise, using plain language, and designing with the audience in mind. Dashboards, summaries, visuals—whatever helps get the point across faster should be part of the process.

A simple maturity model for contract reporting

Not every team is starting from the same place. Use this light framework to gauge where your reporting process stands today and where it could go next.

Efficient reporting: done step-by-step

Now, real efficiency comes from layering simple, smart steps that take the chaos out of reporting, and make it something your team can actually rely on.

Here’s how to build an efficient contract reporting process from the ground up.

1. Centralize contract data

You can’t report on what you can’t find. So step one in improving your contracting process is to bring all your contract data into one place, ideally a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) platform or another centralized system.

💡 A tool that can help you make signing more efficient with e-signatures, can also be your go-to solution to easily centralize all important contract data, all while ensuring perfect contract security.

Take Autenti as an example.

With it, you can:

• Sign any contract online in just about a few minutes,
• Easily go back to each e-signature’s trail with the exact IP address and timestamp tied to each signature with complete audit trails,
• Archive completed or signed contracts to go back to them when reporting,
• Filter the documents by sender data (e.g., name, email), date, or use a search engine and type in what you’re looking for to find important documents quicker than ever before.
  
  

2. Define roles and responsibilities

Efficient reporting doesn’t happen in a vacuum (just like any other step in your strategy, from negotiation to termination), it needs clarity around who does what. Be sure to:

• Clarify ownership: who pulls the data? Who assembles the report? Who reviews and signs off? When those questions have clear answers, there’s less confusion and fewer delays.
  
  
• Establish checkpoints: make approval and review steps part of the process, not an afterthought. Everyone should know when (and how) they’re expected to weigh in.
  
  

3. Standardize report templates

Every department has different needs, but that doesn’t mean every report should be a custom project.

So, for proactive management in the reporting phase, make sure to:

• Create consistent formats: tailor templates to suit legal, procurement, finance, or executive audiences, but keep the structure familiar across the board. This speeds up both report creation and review, just like with contract writing.
  
  
• Use modular templates: build flexible components, like risk summaries, renewal timelines, or value metrics that can be swapped in or out depending on the report's purpose.
  
  

4. Automate workflows where possible

Once the core structure is in place, automation helps keep everything moving without constant hand-holding.

Here, you can:

• Set smart triggers: need a reminder 90 days before renewal deadlines? Want a compliance report every first Monday? Need to know the contract status across documents? Let your contract automation system handle those prompts.
  
  
• Automate regular reporting cadences: whether it's weekly status updates or quarterly summaries, schedule them. Automation not only saves time but also reduces the risk of missed reports.

If applicable and safe for your data, you can also use AI for automating some parts of the reporting process (more on that later).

5. Build in a non-chaotic feedback loop

Even the most well-designed process needs tuning over time. What worked well this quarter might need adjusting next quarter.

To optimize your reports, make sure to find the time to review the reporting process itself (how the report was built and delivered.)

Was it clear? Was it late? Was anything missed?

A quick survey or informal chat can uncover valuable insights for improvement.

But don’t overdo it. Fixating on improving the process too much can also be an overkill. Try to collect reporting feedback once a quarter, maximum.

What tools support efficient reporting?

We’ve mentioned Autenti for signing off and archiving signed contracts to find them easily (all with an official stamp, making it that much easier to confirm their validity).

But what about tools that make the process of reporting itself easier?

Well, there’s a handful to choose from.

From modern CLM tools and Contract Management Software platforms that help with real-time dashboards, to integrations with BI tools for advanced and layered visualizations.

But what we’re all really interested in is: can AI help here?

Using AI for contract reporting (the smart way)

In short: AI can be a quiet, reliable assistant that saves hours reporting on contracts each month.

For example, the World Commerce and Contracting Association’s take on using AI within contract management and how it affects the role of a Contract Manager is:

“AI will both impact and expand the role of contract managers and will reposition contract managers within organizations with materially positive impact”.

In the same piece of content, WorldCC outlines five scenarios for using AI in contracts, ranging from human-led processes where AI only supports making informed business decisions, to fully automated workflows where AI handles drafting, clause selection, and compliance for low-complexity agreements.

For starters, the key is not to over-engineer, but to plug AI into small but high-impact points in your reporting process, helping you achieve contract milestones faster.

Here are a few smart ways to use AI in contract reporting:

• Auto-summarizing contract terms: instead of manually reviewing dozens of contracts to extract key clauses, AI models can quickly summarize termination terms, renewal windows, or indemnity clauses for inclusion in reports.
  
  
• Smart tagging and categorization: AI can help classify contracts by region, risk level, or business unit. This creates more accurate and filterable dashboards.
  
  
• Natural language querying: some CLM platforms are introducing chat-style interfaces, where users can ask, “How many contracts are expiring this quarter?” and get an instant answer. It’s like giving reporting access to non-technical users without training them on filters or formulas.
  
  

But is AI a safe option here?

Something crucial to say is: any AI you introduce into your reporting workflow should be used with strict access controls and data governance in place.

That means choosing tools that offer robust encryption, audit trails, and clear compliance with data privacy standards like GDPR or SOC 2. But mainly, approved by your internal security managers, they know best.

If there’s any uncertainty, one good practice by the World Commerce and Contracting Association is to define any sensitive information before even deciding to use AI:

“It may be worthwhile to supplement the definition of Confidential Information with a list of examples, using the phrase “including, but not limited to, …” to provide broad categories of likely information.“

Lastly, how to approach those changes?

If after reading this whole piece, the only thing popping in your mind is: “Ugh, but no one will want to change what we already have. We’ve always done it that way.”, you’re not alone.

Contract reporting (and changing the way you’re handling that process, not just establishing key performance indicators to track) comes with its own challenges.

Like resistance to change.

In process-heavy organizations, change can feel risky, often especially when it comes to analytics. Nobody likes constant changes in data.

So, start small. Show how faster reporting frees up time put into your contract management processes, not adds work. When you get better pieces of insights, show them off. So that, hopefully, everyone else gets inspired and excited for the change.