How Reporting Helps You Get a Handle on Your Contracts

Managing a growing contract portfolio can be an overwhelming responsibility. Without the right systems and processes to help keep you on track, making the jump from a few dozen to a couple hundred contracts can create complications that take valuable time and effort to correct.

One of the solutions legal teams and contract managers often look for to help regain control of corporate agreements is dedicated contract lifecycle management software with custom reporting features. By adding reporting capabilities to your existing contract management process, you can better understand what’s hidden in your corporate agreements, the strengths and weaknesses of your contracting process, and trends to monitor going forward.  

This article explores how CLM software reporting features can help you quickly get a handle on your contract portfolio.

Understand what dates and deadlines are approaching

When a contract management workflow is unorganized, one of the most noticeable repercussions is missed contract dates and deadlines. It’s not uncommon for a business to turn to solutions like contract management software after missing an opt-out window that causes a contract to renew automatically. This oversight can lead to a significant amount of money wasted on an agreement that is no longer needed, and reputational damage for those responsible for the missed deadlines.  In some cases, it may even lead to a breach of contract.

Contract reporting provides a way to see all of your upcoming contract expirations in one place. One common use of a contract management software’s reporting feature is to run a report of all contracts with an expiration date in the next 90 days (or 30 days, 60 days, etc.). While alerts and notifications typically remind you of an upcoming milestone for a particular agreement, this type of report gives you a broader view of every contract that needs to be addressed in the near future. 

Automatically receive insight into your entire portfolio

Software with reporting features that automatically deliver contract data and insights to your inbox helps you create a disciplined and structured method for reviewing contract performance on a regular basis. When contract reporting isn’t part of your regular routine, it can often get lost as more time-sensitive tasks are prioritized. Far too often, contracts are signed and forgotten about until they either automatically renew or an issue with the agreement arises. 

But understanding what is happening in your portfolio, both in the past and coming up in the near future, is too important to ignore. Custom reporting allows you to automatically schedule reports based on any information tagged in your contracts. For example, this gives you a simple, straightforward way to:

• Schedule a monthly report that shows all of your contracts with opt-out windows in the month ahead

• Run a quarterly report of every active contract that contains a specific high-risk clause that your legal team needs to review

• Create an annual report that shows every vendor agreement with a value greater than $10,000

Automatically scheduling reports ensures that you (or others on your team) will always have the information needed to make informed contract decisions.

Keep colleagues and stakeholders informed

Another way contract reporting improves your ability to remain in control of your contracts is by streamlining the process of sharing insights with others in your organization. For most businesses, many individuals and departments have a role to play in the contract management process, even though contracts may “live” in the legal department. By establishing custom reports for various business units throughout your organization, you can give department heads, executives, and other key stakeholders information about the contracts that are relevant to their specific roles or teams. 

For example, you might schedule a monthly report for the head of your sales team so they can easily see the status of all active customer agreements without having to search for that information.

Reporting is a crucial part of the contract management process and provides the information and insights needed to make sound business decisions. Contract management software with custom reporting features simplifies and streamlines the process so you can spend less time creating reports and more time analyzing the information to improve your contract management workflow.