Contract administration can bring forth a host of challenges.
There needs to be an established plan and follow-through within a set timeline. Teams must track contract financials. There must be a plan for overseeing the contract lifecycle. Teams must have a plan for encountering risk variables.
Clearly, contract administrators have a lot on their plate. There is ample room for deleterious errors, contract risks, and bottlenecks – especially with manual contract methods. Fortunately, contract management software can help reduce the time-consuming need for manual processes. Here's how.
Contract administration is the planning and execution of contracts. It involves oversight of contract lifecycle management and the tracking of:
The eight stages of contract management and contract administration go hand-in-hand. Administration requires an analytical and proactive approach, in addition to contract management responsibilities.
A contract administrator is tasked with creating and managing contracts with which an organization is involved. A contract administrator is responsible for juggling:
As such, contract administrators need an organized, seamless, and centralized plan to successfully address all of these responsibilities. Project management skills are a plus for better managing the contracting process.
A contract administration plan is a blueprint for addressing the important details and processes surrounding a contract. It is used by contract administrators and their teams to:
The best administration plans are supported by contract artificial intelligence.
Leading-edge contract management software can help contract administrators create the best possible plan. Essential contract management tools can help contract professionals with every facet of the administration process.
No contract administrator should traverse the ever-changing landscape of administration with disorganized contract lifecycle management. Organizations and legal teams need a robust solution that:
Cutting-edge CLM software solutions support contract administrators with user-friendly interfaces for the key contract lifecycle stages - including:
Trusted contract lifecycle management software supports comprehensive risk assessment and OFAC search mapping. Contract administrators can graphically visualize risk for future-minded risk management.
No longer arises the need to manually sift through contract records for any risk variables. Contract administrators and their teams can reap the benefits of a visualized graph system.
The graphs can plot contracts based upon an automated risk score. This score can help provide user-friendly risk analysis measurements of active contracts. As such, contract administrators can prioritize important contract risk factors for enhanced decision-making.
Furthermore, contract administrators and their team members can easily analyze intelligently projected contract performance. Hypothetical risk variables and exposure can be analyzed within an eye-catching risk assessment matrix.
The contract risk assessment matrix and statistical data analysis can help identify positive, neutral, and negative facets of contracts. As such, they can improve planning. Contract administrators can also reap the benefits of message alerts, as mentioned before. These can alert users if a contract incurs a value of X% higher than the average within their CLM system database.
Contract administrators can also use the OFAC search graphical risk tool. This tool can pinpoint if vendors, employees, and customers comply with the Office of Foreign Asset Control’s national sanctions lists.
This functionality allows contract administrators to reconcile OFAC compliance for pre-award and post-award contract management stages. Thus, they can improve risk mitigation. Similarly, contract administrators can configure rules to quickly alert users if a contract meets or exceeds a configured OFAC Search percentage.
An eye-catching contract financials page can provide contract administrators with a simple but comprehensive financial summary for each contract. The report can include basic contract details and contract data at a glance, such as:
Contract administrators can configure the Budget Used field within their contract management systems to set budget thresholds for contracts. For example, contract administrators can configure so that a resource is alerted once a contract’s used budget amount passes 80%.
Contract administrators can also run reports around the financials of all contracts within their CLM systems. These reports can be set to run by categories such as by contract type, department, counterparty, and various others.
Contract administrators are encouraged to use these contract management software financial data reports to attain a holistic view of contract finances!
Leading contract software solutions offer visionary contract analytics and reporting tools to enhance contract lifecycle management. CobbleStone Contract Insight® - for instance - offers executive graphical dashboards to push contract analytics into the future and answer questions important to your organization.
Executive graphical dashboards that CobbleStone® contract administrators can leverage include dashboards for:
These dashboards can serve as one among many reasons why CobbleStone is the premier contract software suite on the market. They simplify and streamline contract management software processes with the foremost reporting tools.
Are you - as a contract administrator - interested in the functionality highlighted in this blog? If so, you will be excited to know that CobbleStone offers so much more than administration tools alone.
CobbleStone Contract Insight offers user-friendly features of contract management software - including those for the contract administration process. Your contract management team can efficiently:
Quadrant Knowledge Solutions recognizes CobbleStone as a CLM Leader in the Spark MatrixTM Report - and it's plain to see why!
Get started today by booking your free demo.
This blog was updated on August 7, 2023. It was originally published in July 2021.