Writer: Norman Kretzmer, the founder and CEO of Contract Understanding
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Decades after the notion of a paperless office was first conceived, most organisations still need to stay on top of massive volumes of printed documentation.
While paper documents such as invoices, customer records and receipts are becoming increasingly digitised, contracts and other legal documents are still largely stored and managed in filing cabinets.
For many businesses, the result is document chaos. Paper documents are expensive to store on site, hard to track and easy to misplace. There are also security concerns when a company is trying to keep tabs on dozens or even hundreds of confidential documents scattered across different departments.
Moreover, paper documents are a roadblock to efficiency and transparency in the business. If contracts are signed and relegated to a dusty storage room, it’s all too easy to lose track of vital information and tasks, such as who the counterparties are, deadlines for renewals and renegotiation, and contractual penalties or incentives.
There is, thankfully, a better way with the move towards software as a service (SaaS) platforms. Today’s SaaS solutions enable you to rapidly digitise contracts, including agreements with vendors and service providers, sales agreements, leases and rental contracts, employee contracts, and subscription agreements.
This, in turn, enables you to gain better visibility into your contracts, automate business processes, and facilitate better collaboration within the business and with counterparties in legal agreements. Here are some of the benefits that your business can achieve from using SaaS solutions to improve the management of documents such as contracts:
Cost-efficiency – Adopting a SaaS solution is an affordable way to digitise paper and store documents. You will pay an affordable monthly subscription for a software solution that enables you to store and manage your documents, with no need to invest in underlying infrastructure. You’ll be able to scale up effortlessly as your requirements evolve and your business grows.
Faster speed of deployment and lower barriers to entry – There are no upfront IT costs involved in adopting a SaaS platform, significantly lowering the barriers to entry as well as ongoing IT costs.
Furthermore, SaaS applications can be deployed quickly since there’s no need to install software on individual devices.
Accessibility – With your contracts stored in a cloud repository, your team will have the information at their fingertips whenever and wherever they need it – no need to dig through cabinets to find a contract before it’s time to renew or cancel. You’ll have access to contracts and amendments in one place.
Data security and compliance – SaaS contract management solutions should include robust security features, such as encryption, access controls, and data loss prevention mechanisms, to protect sensitive information from unauthorised access, breaches, or data loss.
Enhanced visibility – A SaaS platform will offer you better visibility into involved parties, obligations, deadlines, and clauses of your contracts.
This will help you to meet any deadlines as well as to ensure you comply with any terms and conditions.
It will also enable you to ensure you avoid penalties – for example, for late payments – as well as take full advantage of any contractual benefits and incentives.
Process automation – You can’t automate business processes unless you digitise paper and store it in a shared, centralised system.
An advanced SaaS solution will use AI to extract essential details and clauses from uploaded contracts, examining documents and pinpointing critical data points like involved parties, deadlines, benefits and obligations.
This will help you streamline and automate tasks such as renewals, terminations, price escalations and breaches via automation.
It will ensure better quality and consistency of work, reduce errors, and free up employee hours you can use to grow your business.
Disaster recovery – SaaS contract management and backup solutions offer built-in disaster recovery capabilities, with data replicated across multiple data centres. In the event of hardware failures, natural disasters, or other unforeseen events, you’ll still be able to retrieve your important legal information.
With today’s SaaS platforms, any business can benefit from a cutting-edge solution that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to facilitate accurate data capture.
This offers you a scalable and reliable way to manage documents and data, improve collaboration and ensure compliance in an increasingly digital and interconnected world.
