A Guide To Education Contract Management Software

Content

• What is Education Contract Management Software?
• Customizable Dashboard
• Centralized Repository
• Contract Automation 
• AI & Bulk Actions 
• CRM & ERP Integrations
• Contract Management Security
• How does Education Contract Management Software help? 
• Conclusion

Universities, colleges, and schools oversee a sizable number of contracts every day. Managing these legal documents across divisions and departments can be challenging for any institution. Education contract management software significantly lessens the practical difficulties of facilitating the contract lifecycle.   

Creating, negotiating, executing, and managing contracts can all be done from a single platform by higher education institutions with ease by adopting and implementing a proper contract management system. It can save them from drawn-out processes, unnecessary risks, and expensive long-term problems. Here is how the legal, financial, procurement, and administrative departments can work together to create legal documents for the entire organization using contract management software.  

What is Education Contract Management Software?

Contract management software aims to simplify contract administration for schools, colleges, and universities. They can optimize each stage of the contract lifecycle with simple tools and procedures. Traditional contract management involves manual processes that tend to take more time and resources, resulting in increased costs. With today’s modern contract management software solutions, higher education institutions can automate processes, boost contract transparency, centralize their systems, and increase operational efficiency.

• Customizable Dashboard

Contract management software for higher education comes with configurable dashboards. Organizations can utilize these graphic dashboards to oversee the entire contract life. As the template is customizable, there is no information overload. Individual departments can curate the contract management system to reflect their requirements. As a result, it streamlines contract information and processes for the various teams cooperating on contract management.  

The contract management solution also offers comprehensive reporting and analytics tools. By producing customized contract reports, institutions with visibility problems can get around the drawbacks. It makes real-time data on contract value, vendor agreements, sales agreements, approval timelines, and other pertinent topics easily accessible to users. 

• Centralized Repository 

By consolidating all legal documents in one location, organizations can streamline the contract lifecycle and facilitate collaboration between stakeholders, colleges, and universities. Contract management solution offers digital repositories for businesses to securely store all their contracts and associated files. Thus, legal and business teams can maintain visibility into the vendors servicing the educational institution and avoid contract duplication. 

The centralized system provides pre-approved templates and clause libraries to expedite standardized contract generation. Users can set up accepted language, terms, and format to bring consistency into the contracting process. Thus, any department can self-serve contractual agreements without compromising compliance or organizational standards.   

• Contract Automation

Process acceleration is essential for businesses with large customer bases. Additionally, when it comes to contract management, organizations need quick results without sacrificing competence. Contract management software empowers legal departments to achieve that with automated workflows. Users can create unique workflows and assign candidates to hasten the generation, negotiation, execution, and management of contracts. Therefore, schools and colleges can guarantee that contracts progress smoothly through each contract lifecycle phase.  

Higher education institutions can more easily keep track of contract milestones with the help of automated reminders offered by contract management software. For any significant event, organizations can trigger notifications to inform relevant parties. As a result, businesses can act promptly to review, renew, and extend contracts and never miss a deadline. Contract management systems also come with automated functions to track contractual obligations.  Without the legal department stepping in, they ensure that all parties abide by the contract's terms.   

• AI & Bulk Actions 

Manually managing all contracts required for higher education can be tiresome for the legal department. With contract management software, growing businesses can scale their contracting process. The intuitive solution offers bulk actions, empowering users to create, edit, copy, share, and sign contracts in large numbers. Consequently, it expedites routine administrative tasks, allowing the legal team to concentrate on high-value contracts.  

The sheer number of vendors, providers, and businesses that educational institutions must interact with is staggering. It means convoluted negotiation processes with multiple parties and contract versions. Contract management software enables users to streamline negotiation by facilitating online redlining. It makes sure that all parties involved are in the know and have access to current information. Moreover, the system’s advanced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and AI capabilities improve the searchability function. Anytime, they can conduct a quick search and retrieve pertinent contract data. Additionally, the tailored filters guarantee that no contract or information is ever out of reach.  

• CRM & ERP Integrations 

In addition to their sophisticated features, education contract management software can enhance the contracting procedure by integrating it with pertinent business applications. They can therefore modify the system depending on the institutional needs. Integrating with electronic signature solutions like Adobe Sign, DocuSign, and Sertifi allows users to sign documents online within the contract management platform. E-signing empowers parties to quickly and legally execute contracts.  

Educational contract management software can integrate with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP solutions to further enhance business operations. Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics integration allows users to auto-populate customer data and generate contracts within the CRM platform. Integrating with Microsoft Business Central enables organizations to oversee the financial performance of every contract. There are countless opportunities for educational institutions to enhance contract management. 

• Contract Management Security 

Data security is a top concern for educational institutions handling sensitive contracts, confidential information, and intellectual property. The already-existing Microsoft 365 environment serves as the foundation for Dock's contract management software. Therefore, organizations can store contracts and related documents in Microsoft 365 instead of relying on third-party sites.   

Apart from the phenomenal security of Microsoft and SharePoint, contract management software also has user-based access. It means only authorized personnel can access contracts, dashboards, and certain privileges. It ensures that there is no data leakage and sensitive information does not end up in the wrong hands. Role-based permission is quite helpful for educational institutions with multiple parties involved in the contracting process. 

How does Education Contract Management Software help? 

Education contract management software can help schools, colleges, and universities to streamline and accelerate contract lifecycle management, helping them to achieve their goals more effectively It enables institutions to centralize and organize all of the contracts into a single, secure location for transparency, productivity, and efficiency. 

• Cut Costs

Modern contract management software allows colleges and universities to reduce costs with an all-in-one contracting platform that works perfectly for any educational model — be it a fully remote, in-person, or hybrid learning model. Higher education is a multi-billion-dollar industry, with colleges and universities spending significantly on operating costs and student costs. With an inefficient approach to managing your institution’s contracts, you run the risk of increasing bottlenecks, wasting time on locating contracts, and completing administrative tasks manually that could easily be automated and taken care of by a contract management system.

All of these factors result in increased operating expenses among higher education institutions. With contract management software, your employees can spend more time working on the higher-priority tasks that would benefit from their manual, hands-on efforts by automating the low-priority tasks. You can make the most of your institution’s budget with a solution that minimizes wasted time and money on inefficient contract management. For example, many institutions still use outdated, manual processes to tackle their contracts, such as physical storage, paper copies of contracts, and manual contract approval procedures. A contract management software solution automates, secures, and digitizes these processes, resulting in saved time and money.

• Organizational Transparency

Maintaining appropriate levels of transparency and visibility into your institution’s contract operations is imperative. Because higher education institutions consist of hundreds of thousands of faculty members and students, contract volumes tend to be exorbitantly high. Various educational departments might employ the same vendors, and centralization of contracts can support users while managing their agreements in a standardized manner.

Additionally, a contract management system can support institutions in systematizing their contracting processes that allow for complete transparency and visibility. With this visibility, you can easily determine where areas of improvement exist within your current contracting processes that may span across several campus departments. By gaining comprehensive insights into your contracts, you can assess which areas to optimize with increased investment and which areas to cut costs from.

A dedicated contract dashboard equipped with custom reporting and data analytics allows institutions to identify exactly where and how vendor management can be streamlined. Several other departments involved in contracts, such as finance, legal, and procurement, can leverage these custom reporting and data analytics tools, as well as integrate with business solutions tools. Custom reporting, for example, enables contract managers to determine which contracts are nearing expiration in dated intervals so they can plan for renegotiation during contract renewal. For best results, data analytics and reporting are crucial for gaining a clear understanding of vendor and contract performance.

• Reduce Contract Lifecycle Time
  

To get the absolute most out of every contract, one of the most important factors to consider is contract lifecycle time. A shorter contract lifecycle means less time spent on the contract itself and more time spent developing and executing other contracts. And what does time equal? Money.

While this may seem like a vast oversimplification, it goes without saying that saving time while maintaining quality is one of the best characteristics of any successful business process. Higher education institutions can do just that by implementing contract management software that cuts down on contract lifecycles overall, allowing for an increased volume of contracts to be completed from beginning to end of the lifecycle in the same time period.

Consider the average number of days of a contract lifecycle in your organization. How long does it take to draft, review, negotiate, and sign your contracts?

Contract management software standardizes several stages of your contracting process with pre-approved contract templates and more, leading to an efficient, accurate, and rapid approach to contract management. By increasing efficiency, you can scale your contract operations and get more accomplished within the same amount of time. An advanced contract management system will only support your institution in gaining the competitive advantage that will serve you as time goes on and as your institution’s population grows.

• Increase Productivity
  

After making the switch to a digital contract management solution from an outdated, manual contracting process, you will experience the productivity benefits almost instantly. Contract management software is a worthy investment that allows you to tighten up operating expenses, supporting your institution in several contract-related processes. For example, by centralizing your organization’s contracts in a repository and utilizing compliant, pre-approved contract templates, you can easily draft accurate contracts faster and get contract lifecycles rolling. In addition, you assist your procurement department because they won’t need to spend as much time authoring and negotiating agreements, and this, in turn, reduces the buying cycle, saving your institution time and money.

Do any of these four concepts apply to your institution’s contract management process? Contract management software will provide your college or university with some incredibly tangible contracting advantages that will support high volumes of complex agreements.

Reduce operating costs, increase organizational transparency, cut down on contract lifecycle times, and boost productivity today with a solution that makes contract management remarkably simple.

Conclusion 

Schools, colleges, and universities manage a high volume of products and services across multiple departments. That is why they need a sophisticated system to handle all the business agreements associated with their daily operations. The education contract management software offers an array of functions and procedures to manage contracts, from creation to negotiation, execution, and management. It enables all the relevant stakeholders and teams to productively collaborate on the contract management process from a centralized platform.  

The secure digital repository protects sensitive educational data and contracts from data leakage. With automated workflows, pre-approved templates, and version control, compliant contracts progress through the lifecycle without any roadblocks. With electronic signature solutions, users can safely sign and execute contracts within the CMS (Contract Management Software) platform in no time. Moreover, contract management software for higher education seamlessly integrates with leading CRM and ERP applications to optimize business operations.  

Get a live demo with our Dock 365 experts to explore the possibilities of contract management software.