As businesses grow, their transaction and contract teams are tasked with larger volumes of more complex agreements, but often don’t have more resources to handle the extra work. In the early days, email, word documents, spreadsheets, and local storage will do the job, but those tools and processes don’t scale.  

As teams grow, requiring purpose-built technology just to deal with their contracts and agreements, the solutions available to them often include more complexity than necessary for a business of their size. Complex systems require more money and time to implement, more than growing businesses can afford. Businesses are left to make a decision between a platform with far too many features, or no solution at all, when all they really need is a simpler way to automate and minimize their manual processes.

In this article, we’ll go over the basics of contract automation, including some signs that it’s time for your team to adopt a tool to implement it. As you read this article, think about the way your team creates, negotiates, and signs contracts and agreements today. Ask yourself a few basic questions: Which technologies are used? Who has access to those tools? What problems do you run into? How will your needs change as you continue growing?

What is Contract Automation?

Sometimes, when the term automation gets used, people get the wrong impression. Either that it’s far too technological for their needs, or that it will be too labour intensive a system to set up. We believe automation, for contracts and agreements, is a system to create, negotiate, sign, store, and analyze contracts following a set process with as little manual management as possible. Essentially, automation takes care of the most repetitive aspects of your processes so you can use your expertise to the fullest. This type of automation for contracts and agreements can include the following aspects:

• Custom Transaction Workflow Templates
• Centralized Self-Service Contracts and Supporting Documents
• Dynamic Forms to Collect Data
• Activity and Approval Workflow
• Integrated E-signature

How do You Know if You Need Contract Automation?

Before deciding whether or not your team needs a tool to manage contracts and agreements, you need to examine your current processes. Consider the types of transactions your organization handles as well as the steps involved in activities throughout their lifecycles. As you read through the following symptoms of an inefficient contracting system, think about the opportunities that would result from a more efficient contracting platform.

Your processes are complex.

In the early stages of a company’s growth, the volume of transactions is low and the flow of documents can be managed on an ad hoc basis. As the business expands, many people and systems become involved in the contract process. If your team is using too many tools (three or more), you’re likely wasting employee time and introducing unnecessary risks.

Your processes aren’t standardized

When your transaction processes aren’t standardized, your team spends far too much time manually creating materials, communicating with counter-parties and managing the workflow. Standardized and centralized transaction templates, contracts and forms result in much more consistent outcomes. They’re also much easier to create, negotiate, finalize and understand.

Your agreements involve multiple stakeholders.

Recent research (link) finds that the average contract at a growing company (fewer than 500 employees) goes through 2.9 versions and 4.4 approvers before it’s finalized. Without a platform specifically designed to manage contracts, it can be unwieldy or even impossible to manage all the negotiations, handoffs and signatures involved in that process.

Your contracts need to be managed after completion

Most business contracts require ongoing management and access to audit trails for regulatory purposes—whether its tracking obligations and milestones, or version history. Without a solution like Pathways, it takes significantly more time to find a contract and locate a relevant section of terms for reference. With the central storage and search capabilities, your team will save a lot of time managing your growing library of agreements.

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What Makes Pathways The Right Transaction Automation Platform?

Pathways is built for companies that are looking for a better way to manage their contracts and agreements. Unlike other solutions, however, we’re optimized for simplicity. Pathways works as a central hub to standardize contract workflows, and automate common steps in your process and organize the archive of completed transactions. With integrated eSignature, Pathways can easily route any contract for signature with just a few clicks.

Because it can be set up almost immediately at a low cost, Pathways lets you get right to business and reduces your risk, right away. We’re designed to help sales teams close deals faster and give legal teams exactly the right level of oversight to increase compliance and reduce risk. With an intuitive administrative back end, it’s easy to create and re-use a workflow template into place and give any user the right level of access.  

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