How To Use A Contract Repository: The Benefits and Functions

The Dock 365 Contract Management System (CMS) uses a centralized contract repository. In this repository, you can create, store, sort, and manage contracts in one location, allowing you to find contracts quickly while increasing visibility. The contract repository includes an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capability to convert old contracts and make them searchable within the database.

The Dock 365 Contract Management System will offer you a comprehensive understanding of all aspects of your contract management processes. Our effortless contract management life cycle platform allows you to review every part of your customer and vendor contracts, set deadlines and review dates, create and edit contracts, and use contract tracking tools to track various items and obligations. Using our CMS solution, you will have every contract within direct access at any time with a customizable search function where you can set pre-made filters for different contract and document types. To create a cohesive and streamlined contract management process, we recommend utilizing a centralized contract repository to store all of your contracts.

Content-

• What is a contract repository?
• Contract Repository Implementation
• Why You Should Opt for a Cloud-Based Contract Repository
• Why will a contract repository benefit my business?
• Let’s discuss key benefits a contract repository provides to your business strategy
• Conclusion

What is a contract repository?

A contract repository is a centralized place where contracts and related metadata is kept and managed. The repository will function in various ways based on the type of business, growth of the business, quantity of users, and types of contracts and documents.

Microsoft Excel has historically been the key software used by business to store contracts. Consequentially, utilizing spreadsheets is very risky and can leave your business vulnerable to several potential pitfalls including the following:

• Subpar supplier or vendor performance
• Obscure risks
• Manual management errors
• Overbearing administrative burdens
• Substandard version control
• Failure due to a single point of contact with a given spreadsheet
• Missed deadlines and critical dates

By implementing a centralized contract repository, you create organized solutions for data storage and design efficient internal processes.

Contract Repository Implementation

First, you must locate all existing contracts to be placed into your contract repository. Ensure your software is updated to the most recent version and that you are able to upload and extract contract data. Contract management software can allow you to extract contract data into your new repository.

In the case of adding new documents and contracts, be sure to add them into the contract repository to mitigate disarray and fragmentation in your storage system. The best part of having a centralized contract repository is the way it takes every document in places them into a very secure place.

Why You Should Opt for a Cloud-Based Contract Repository

Cloud-based contract repositories are ideal for time management and efficiency. This is because the energy and time spent towards manually searching for contracts and clauses, or toward monitoring compliance, can be drastically reduced. By using the contract repository, key contract managers and employees can shift their efforts towards more important tasks that require a hands-on approach, rather than be pulled to administrative duties. This way, your contract management team can increase productivity instantaneously.

Implement the Dock 365 Contract Management System today so you can leverage all the features that a centralized contract repository offers. 

The Dock 365 Contract Management System includes the centralized contract repository to provide your business with a modernized way to manage contract life cycles. You can perform several functions pertaining to your contracts in a single secure place with the repository.

Why will a contract repository benefit my business?

Leveraging all that a contract repository has to offer will not only improve contract storage but will also offer ways to improve day-to-day business operations and business-vendor relationships.

Let’s discuss key benefits a contract repository provides to your business strategy:

      1. Increase data cohesiveness

Using a contract repository will decrease the fragmentation of your data and increase overall cohesiveness and organization. During contract life cycle management, it’s very likely that data will get fragmented at some point. Even by using a solution such a SharePoint to collect your data, it’s inevitable for data to become scattered due to numerous people and parties inputting different information.

As your business grows, data fragmentation will increase – so it’s imperative to implement a contract repository as a solution sooner rather than later. With every new contract, or when an existing contract is modified, your business is required to collect more data by creating more spreadsheets. Using spreadsheets is especially risky, and when contracts become more complicated, it can be a human error that leads your business to overwrite existing spreadsheets or to lose transparency and visibility in your contract management practices.

Utilizing a centralized contract repository will help in contract and metadata storage and management on a large scale. Additionally, contract metadata can be uploaded into the repository for contracts that are both new and pre-existing.

      2. Boost accuracy with automation

Human error is one of the largest areas for potential discrepancies that you will encounter during contract life cycle management. By entering data manually into spreadsheets, errors are bound to occur. Small errors can lead to large impacts business-wide.

What could human error cause in my business?

• Reduced mastery of contract obligations
• Missed renewals and deadlines
• Misinformed business decisions
• Inaccuracies in various reviews and reports

The Dock 365 Contract Management System offers a centralized contract repository that can automate data entry. In this way, your contract management team can work with a consistent user interface and eliminate human error – giving you and your stakeholders more confidence in the data storage, security, and accuracy of your contract repository.

      3. Conduct efficient contract tracking

While spreadsheets provide a simplistic overview of data, as well as a convenient method to track contracts, using spreadsheets is manual contract management method that cannot effectively handle complex contracts or a high volume of contracts for an organization.

To scale your business and make the most of your relationships with your vendors, it’s necessary to switch from a manual contract tracking approach to a digitized one. If you desire to increase the number of vendors you work with or the volume and/or complexity of contracts, make the switch so that you can optimize these processes.

Contract management teams can certainly become overwhelmed with administrative tasks, which will only increase in number in direct relationship to your business growth. It can prove to be difficult and time-inefficient to navigate through administrative and contract-based tasks while in pursuit of business objectives. The last thing you want to happen is for data entry to be flawed and for metadata to be in disarray because of poor methods.

By using a cloud-based and centralized contract repository, you can ease the scaling process of your business by having the best solutions at your fingertips so you can efficiently manage numerous contracts and users. Our Dock 365 Contract Management System will give you the power and confidence to employ the contract repository for data collection and storage in a single, secure place.

      4. Relieve the stresses of your contract management team

Does your contract management team spend far too much time looking for certain contracts, clauses, or associated documents?

Is the biggest headache found in the process of locating key information?

In general, would you describe your contract data and documents as “all over the place”?

When your contract management team conducts a “search mission” for pertinent documents as a part of day-to-day operations, it’s a sign that the current system is below standard. Thankfully, there is absolutely a solution for these types of headaches. If your team is overburdened by the need to locate hard-to-find documents consistently, it pulls time and energy away from contract administration.

Using a centralized contract repository rather than manual data entry via spreadsheets, you set up your contract management team for success and time-efficiency. Contracts can be easily located and filtered through so that your employees can focus on other critical tasks and propel business objectives forward.

      5. Increase compliance

When you have no clue where contracts are located, it makes it astronomically difficult to prove if your business is in compliance with specific rules and regulations.

With fragmented data storage and management, you make it nearly impossible to define what is occurring organization-wide. Reduce regulatory and financial risks by employing a centralized contract repository. By having on-hand access to supplier or vendor certificates, you can stay informed of the correct actions to take, ensuring you provide external auditors with proof of your business’s compliance. A centralized contract repository can function as a source of truth of your business dealings and serves as a source where non-compliance occurrences can be identified and then corrected.

Conclusion

A centralized contract repository will give your business the best possible results in your contract management process by effectively storing and managing contracts and documents in a single, secure place. Implementing a contract repository will also increase visibility and transparency across your organization, massively improving your contract management approach.

With the Dock 365 Contract Management System, you can up-level your business strategy and increase the value of your experiences with clients and vendors alike. To learn more about how Dock 365 can enhance your contract management processes with our centralized contract repository feature, click here and schedule a free demo today.