Contract Approval Process

Are You Happy with Your Current Contract Approval Process?

If your company is like many, it has no efficient means of managing your contract approval process. Contract review requests may come through phone calls, faxes, or emails, creating a great deal of confusion and inefficiency.

The Problem with Manual Contract Approvals

• Employees and managers cannot see where contract requests are in the approval process.

• New or revised contracts that need immediate approval to support the business’s operations or, in the case of sales, win new business are delayed or lost due to the request not receiving approval in a timely matter.

• Request information is missing, requiring numerous back-and-forth communications to get all the required information.

• There is no audit trail for who requested approval, who approved it, when it was submitted/approved, etc.

• There is no high-level view of how many requests were submitted and where bottlenecks may occur.

Ready to automate and streamline your contract review and approval process?

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Approving contracts with workflow management

A contract approvals workflow is an automated process for reviewing and approving contracts that regulates the tasks involved in submitting, reviewing, collaborating on, and, ultimately, approving standardized contracts in a highly predictable manner, ensuring compliance.

Timeliness and productivity are dramatically increased with contract automation, providing employees with a central web dashboard for submitting and tracking a request for new contracts. After implementing a workflow management solution, the contract approval process becomes more streamlined. Contract approvals are sometimes received in several hours, down from days or weeks. Custom alerts and triggers ensure that anyone involved knows their next task and when it’s due.

Common Features in Contract Approval Software

• The ability to attach and route documents with a contract intake form.

• The ability to sign and/or time and date stamp contracts.

• An audit trail to show who did what and when.

• Redlines can be attached and sent back to the requestor for legal review.

• A defined contract approval process with business rules for exceptions.

Transparency

If the administrator desires, the individual submitting the request can see the entire path of the submitted contract and whose “desk” it’s sitting on. They will also know immediately if the new contract provisions are approved and can review any revisions or comments made within the dashboard.

Once the process is complete and the contract approved, it can be pushed into the organization’s document management tool of choice for archival. Meanwhile, the entire approval process is auditable anytime.

We have an app for that! Download our Contract Review and Approval process app and quickly get up and running with automation.

Contract Approval Process Example

Below is one example of a contract approval process. Your process is probably different, so Nutrient Workflow lets you customize the workflow to your organization’s needs. Use our drag-and-drop process builder to add tasks, approvers, logic steps, integration, and whatever you need to make your process compliant and efficient.

Contract Approval Process Case Study: Oakland Unified School District

As part of the Oakland Unified School District’s accountability and quality priorities, it needed to automate specific manual tasks bogging down its staff in paperwork and manual follow-up. In search of a more straightforward way to initiate vendor contracts, approve companies that work for the district, and ascertain the necessary approvals from various levels within the district administration, OUSD turned to Nutrient Workflow for an automated request management solution.

Read the Full Case Study

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