The traditional, manual method of contract management demands companies to spend excessive time, money, and company resources to complete every contract lifecycle. However, for non-profit organizations, these resources are limited. Thus, non-profits must be intentional in how they use and allocate resources when working with contracts, especially if they conduct contract management procedures without the support of a dedicated software solution. By understanding the basics, you can ensure that your business processes are compliant, productive, and secure. In today's blog, we discuss the 5 basics that we suggest you focus on to secure contract success for your non-profit.
1. Evolution of priorities in contract management
Contract management procedures must adapt to the fluctuations in business trends and demands. To this end, your contract workflows and standardized processes must reflect these changes in the business landscape.
If you currently oversee and evaluate contracts without taking into consideration these fluctuations, you can incur some significant negative repercussions in your contract management process. In the context of a non-profit organization, it's essential to maintain current contracts and clauses that are adapted to changing regulations and laws to ensure compliance.
To do so, you should consistently review and edit your contracts and their workflows. During these reviews, we recommend paying close attention to the changes in laws and regulations, as well as internal implications on your contracts. In what ways can your contract management procedures improve? Are there upgrades available to leverage and increase efficiency? Which contracts should be considered for renewal, and which should be terminated? By addressing these questions, you can effectively manage and overcome many of the contract management challenges that non-profits consistently face.
2. Configure and optimize automated contract workflows
Three key processes within managing a contract lifecycle are approval, review, and auditing. To streamline these processes, we recommend adopting a customizable, scalable solution that allows users to design automated contract workflows for your NPO.
The ability to configure and activate workflows according to your organization's preferences and hierarchy provides peace of mind. Approval workflows are a must-have, especially if you have a minimum of three approvers for a one contract.
The Dock 365 Non-Profit Contract Management System enables you to easily create workflow templates and clone existing templates, where you can customize your template based on the number of stages and approving parties. We will cover this in more detail below.
3. Utilize contract templates
Contract management templates are absolutely invaluable for non-profits. Templates save time and resources while simplifying and standardizing the contract creation process. Contract creation and contract approval are supported by the flexible nature of templates, where they provide structure to agreements while allowing for editing and adjustments according to a given agreement. You can create templates for different contract categories to easily generate similar contract types within seconds.
In addition to customizable templates, preloaded contract metadata and fields, as well as a comprehensive clause library can support you in drafting accurate contracts while ensuring compliance.
4. Manage contract permissions
Enabling user permissions for each of your contracts can prove to be a considerably intricate process. As you may know, not everyone in your organization needs to have access to every contract. By restricting user permissions, you ensure that data is kept secure and that your contracts and associated documents do not receive unauthorized changes. A dedicated contract management software solution assures that only authorized users can access your contracts. In addition, you can review timestamped histories of who viewed which documents and at what times. You can also identify if any changes were made to a given document.
When the contracts are found in the right hands, contract success is inevitable. Authorized users can draft, edit, and monitor contracts and associated contract metadata within their secure contract management platform. Dock 365 offers an intuitive contract management solution built with permissions features and other capabilities to specifically to address the unique needs of non-profit organizations.
5. Nurture best practices
If there is one factor that can guarantee you secure, productive contract management, it's to maintain CLM best practices. As your business processes and workflows gain momentum, there's the possibility to let things slip through the cracks in terms of obligations management and meeting deadlines. However, the best way to ensure contract management success is to adopt a contract management system. If that system is powered by the unmatched security and technology features of Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, you gain the competitive advantage. This is exactly what Dock 365 has to offer for non-profits.
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