How Contract Reminder Software Can Save Your Business

‌Contracts are the foundation of any business. Miss a deadline, even by one day, and everything can fall apart. This can cost thousands, or even millions, of dollars. Whether it’s a contract renewal or time-sensitive terms, you can’t afford to be late on a deadline. This is why contract reminder software can save your business.‌

On any given day, you probably have your hands full managing multiple projects and contracts. How often have important deadlines slipped through the cracks? ‌The right contract management software can help you stay on top of key dates, avoiding costly expenses, higher renewal costs, or less than ideal auto-renewal terms.

Keeping track of every single contract is absolutely critical for any disputes that might arise: Who is doing what? For how long? Under what terms? What happens if they don’t fulfill their side of the agreement? 

Effective contract management means knowing your contracts inside and out. And, if you don’t, you need to be able to quickly and easily identify the information you need. ‌

When businesses aren’t able to access that information, some (if not all) of the following issues can come up: 

• Key dates like renewals and certificate expirations going by unnoticed
• Duplicate contracts in different locations, each with their own version history 
• Non-compliance with contract regulations 
• Time being lost while searching for contract information 
• Poor supplier performance going unidentified 
• Human error leading to an increased administrative burden‌

The consequences of poor contract management can also affect your revenue: 

• Poor contract management costs businesses an average of 9% of their revenue each year 
• The average cost of a simple contract is $6,900, although it can go up to more than $50,000 for complex contracts. Cutting down on the time spent reviewing and signing contracts through contract management reduces these costs
• Automation can reduce the costs associated with contracts by 25 to 30%

These direct revenue losses don’t account for losses that come from lost time. The ability to save time, and by extension, money, is a huge benefit of proper contract management.

When processes don’t run as smoothly as they should, their failure hurts productivity, which has a direct effect on overall revenues:

• 65% of legal professionals say that their biggest pain point is time lost on administrative tasks
• A report by Aberdeen Group found that it takes an average of 20-30 days to create, negotiate, and finalize a contract 
• The same report found that it takes an average of 3.4 weeks to get a contract approved

Most companies rely on individual employees to keep track of the lifecycle of their contracts. When employees are responsible for manually tracking and managing the contracts that your business depends on, you can find yourself facing significant risk. From high workloads to human error, there’s only so much your employees can do.‌

The goal of contract reminder software, more commonly known as Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software, is to alleviate this risk—taking out the guesswork, cutting down on inefficiencies, and making sure that you never miss a critical deadline.

Contract management software offers benefits and advantages that all businesses need. The digital contracting software can increase efficiency, productivity, and profitability, allowing you to do more with less. At the same time, it lowers potential risks and allows you to stay on top of the life-cycle of your contract.‌

Here are some of the concrete benefits of adopting digital contracting software with a contract reminder system.‌

1. Organized access to all of your business contracts

One of the best parts of digital contracting software is that you’ll never waste time looking for a contract again. Instead of sorting through contracts stored in the cloud, stashed in email inboxes, or tucked away in filing cabinets, digital contracting software securely stores all your contracts in one place.

2. Simplified contract information

Contract management software has built-in data collection mechanisms to help you capture and process contract data. This simplifies the process of sorting through contracts, allowing someone to find the exact contract data they need with no extra training. ‌

This makes it quick and easy to find the contract you’re looking for, see the information you need, and build reports based on as much or as little of the contract data as you need. You can spend less time chasing down information, and more time attending to your team’s legal needs.

3. Proactive renewals of contracts

Companies that are considered “best in class” renew 56% of their contracts annually, according to a report by Aberdeen Group. Other companies only renew 25% of their contracts.

But there’s another side to this—Revenue leakage due to accidental renewal of contracts. This happens when you’re not keeping up with renewal dates, allowing contracts to auto-renew unintentionally. 

Proactively renewing your contracts is an essential part of contract lifecycle management. Each contract should go through a timely pre-renewal review process, so that you can make an informed decision about your future with the vendor or supplier. 

Using a contract reminder software, you can automate this entire process, helping you to keep your annual renewal processes on track.

4. Reminders of important dates

It’s small, but it’s mighty. One of the underrated benefits of any contract management software is a reminder feature. 

Instead of relying on individual employees to manually track renewal dates and contract terms, contract renewal reminder software takes that task off your plate. You choose whether you want reminders, and what you want to be reminded about, and Ironclad takes care of the rest. Learn about Ironclad’s pricing options.

Using the metadata that Ironclad automatically creates, you’re empowered to give your data a life of its own. With intelligent alerts in place, your team can rest assured knowing that you’ll never miss an expiration date or other important milestones.

While contract management software has plenty of benefits, it does much more than just boost your team’s efficiency and streamline your work processes. Contract reminder software can make or break your business.

Consider this example. Two businesses have signed an important contract. What happens when that contract expires?‌

One business hasn’t noticed that the contract expiration date has already passed. They push forward, unaware, until they receive an invoice at a higher rate.

Now they’re scrambling to negotiate and return to their old terms. Unprepared and without a detailed analysis in front of them, they’re forced to renegotiate the contract last minute, and it costs them heavily. 

The other business knows that the contract is expiring several months in advance. They were able to examine the contract prior to renewal. They found a few terms where they could get a better deal from the vendor, and, with their analysis in hand, went into the negotiations ready and prepared to succeed. They come in strong, and they leave with a better contract than they came in with.‌

Good contract management is more than just a helping hand⁠—it’s a powerful tool.

A centralized data repository system offers all kinds of benefits. It’s a way to track contracts, improve overall accuracy, and make the work of searching for details easier for overwhelmed teams. 

While central data repositories are primarily a place to store your contracts, they offer more than any filing cabinet ever could. In today’s digital world, a data repository solution is a software solution. It allows you to centralize your documents and upload your contract metadata, streamlining your workflow. At the end of the day, this software does even more than just simplify your contracts — it transforms them into dynamic and intuitive legal documents that work for you instead of against you.‌

Contract management software is an essential part of any business. And yet many companies continue to work with outdated, paper-based management systems that slow down their internal processes and expose them to all kinds of risks. If you don’t already have a dynamic and intelligent data repository software in place, it’s time to take the leap to a more powerful contract management solution.

With so many contracts—each at a different place in its lifecycle—you might think it’s impossible to stay on top of them all.‌

But letting contract deadlines slip by undetected could be costing your business in more ways than one. From less favorable terms to missed renewal opportunities, you can’t afford to show up unprepared during these critical moments. With the right software solution in place, your business can stop letting contracts gather dust and start using them as strategic assets.

Ironclad’s Dynamic Repository can make sure you never miss a contract deadline again—it comes with a built-in contract reminder app. With intelligent alerts, process automation, and cross-system integrations, you can take back control of your contracts with greater efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility.

If you’re in need of a data repository system, and you’re ready to find confidence and efficiency with an advanced software solution, contact us to request a demo today.