An Introduction to Finance Contract Software

Finance contract software allows organizations to leverage an intelligent contracting approach that optimizes risk management, organizational efficiency, and cost reduction strategies. Contracts are an absolutely essential component to any financial process. Without a user-friendly and all-in-one contract management system with automation capabilities, you run the risk of seriously delaying contract lifecycles and reducing your ROI. Why allow contracts to be a pain-point when there’s an easier, organized method? The solution is simple – invest in a dedicated finance contract software solution.

Why Finance Contract Software Can Help

Globally, financial service professionals have made the transition from manual contract management processes to a digital, automated approach to managing company contracts. According to a 2019 Bloomberg report, automation as become a high priority to financial institutions like Deutsche Bank, who had announced their initiative to cut 18,000 jobs in efforts to reallocate funds into automated processes. Financial organizations and banks in large part have determined the necessity of finance contract software, where such organizations can increase revenue with the assistance of contract automation, as well as improve customer experience and satisfaction with the efficiency provided by process automation.

Why Finance Contract Software Can Help

A subpar contract lifecycle management strategy can result in lost revenue, bottlenecks, lost contracts, reduced customer satisfaction, and a myriad of other detrimental effects to any organization. Furthermore, poor contract management can expose your organization to increased financial risks via missed opportunities, undesirable auto renewals, and failure to deliver upon contracted obligations. For these reasons, its necessary for financial institutions and departments to actively contribute to every stage of the contract lifecycle, and especially so to contract approvals and reviews.

However, many financial organizations still approach their contract management with a traditional, manual method. This might look like saving data within shared drives, storing legal agreements and documents in physical filing cabinets, or using spreadsheets and emails. These storage and management methods create several challenges and can increase the risk for discrepancies and data loss. Financial departments oftentimes lose track of key contract details when their documents are stored in several places, making it difficult to gain on demand insights on their company’s contracts.

Common Questions That Finance Contract Software Can Answer

When working with contracts, it’s important to be able to have access to important contract details at all times so that you can strategize and prioritize tasks. Some common questions that a finance contract software solution can answer within minutes include the following:

1. Which contracts have upcoming auto renewal dates?
2. What contracts are associated with x product or y service?
3. How are vendors performing?
4. Which obligations have our vendors missed and what were the consequences?
5. What is the status of x contract?
6. How has x contract performed and what has led to that result?

Financial institutions and departments should leverage a finance contract software solution to assist their employees in answering these key questions. By digitizing contract lifecycle management, financial organizations can automate and optimize contract managements while improving upon results, return on investment, and risk mitigation.

How Finance Contract Software Improves Contract Management

Finance contract software assists finance teams, departments, and entire financial institutions in increasing profitability, compliance, and obligation enforcement by gaining visibility on where missed opportunities, cost-inefficiencies, compliance errors, failed obligations, and areas of revenue loss exist. Let’s take a look at several ways that finance contract software improves contract management:

Easily Identify Areas to Optimize

With finance contract software, you can identify areas of subpar performance and where costs can be cut. Doing so is easy with proactive, visual dashboards and custom reporting capabilities. Contract data including contact names, organizations, clauses, line items, key dates, obligations, etc. are searchable and organized for easy reporting, allowing financial teams and institutions to execute upon key insights regarding contract terms and performance.

Maintain Awareness of Upcoming Key Dates

Finance contract software allows users to configure automated calendar notifications and alerts to help your organization stay on top of contract auto renewal and expiration dates. In this way, you ensure that obligations are never forgotten about and that your team takes a proactive approach to overseeing every agreement. When enabling alerts and reminders, you can select specific people to receive the reminders, choose when and often to have them sent, and to which online source to have them sent to. This allows your organization to effectively manage risk and improve efficiency.

Effectively Manage Milestones and Contract Terms

Overseeing every stage and the status of your contracts is made possible with finance contract software. For example, managing your contract amendments, terminations, and addendums is fast and effective, and maintaining version control is also remarkably simple. This allows you to mitigate risk and gain time-efficiency in your processes.

Leverage Auditing Capabilities

A finance contract software solution helps organizations maintain compliance by monitoring and automatically notating important deadlines and terms, increasing accuracy and efficiency during auditing. Finance contract software uses a cloud secure digital repository for contract storage. This allows teams to access contract data efficiently for streamlined auditing. Within your repository, every contract activity is tracked and can be used when generating reports, so things like amendments and contract terminations can be used to glean insights for your next steps. In addition, contract authoring is completed within the system with a library full of preapproved contract templates and clauses to ensure that compliant terminology is used. Because your contract management system is a centralized solution, all communication, collaboration, and editing are conducted within the platform so that versions are tracked accurately during reviews and negotiations. Electronic signature integrations also support organizations in maintaining compliance, security, and efficiency in their contracting processes.

Conclusion

To optimize contract management for financial institutions, banks, and finance departments, implementing a user-friendly, intuitive finance contract software system is the smartest decision to make. Such software solutions can assist finance organizations and departments in discovering areas of opportunity, places to cut costs, improvements to make for compliance, and additional methods for mitigating financial risks. It’s clear that leveraging a finance contract software system is key for any organization to easily improve business operations. Dock offers a cost-efficient and proven approach to managing contracts that uses your existing SharePoint and Microsoft 365 tenants. If you're in the market for a dedicated contract lifecycle management software solution, reach out and we would love to assist you with a complimentary demo of our solution.

Learn more about our Dock 365 Contract Management System here.

Learn more about Contract Lifecyle Management (CLM) Software here.

For more information, we welcome you to schedule a free demo with us today.