What Is a Contract App?

Contract apps are used to help companies handle new contract requests, by taking into account the details of the contract, and gathering authorization information. It allows law firms and others dealing with contracts to replace manual contract management, so they can meet large contract volumes without needing more staff. AI software can pull your own clauses unique to your business. By contract apps, business teams can also self-serve from owned templates, so that routine contracts can be negotiated and managed from a centralized location at scale.

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Why Are Contract Apps Important?

Contract apps are essential to maintaining an efficient and effective process of negotiation. A well-managed contract minimizes legal, financial, and brand risks for any organization. Poorly managed contracts, often without contract software, can result in missed renewal and expiration dates, broken obligations, and lack of compliance. When there is disorganization among contracts, there may be friction among team members that will hinder their efficiency. Key dates can be missed due to poor lifecycle management, resulting in costly renewals. This can be avoided by implementing records through contract apps provided by Evisort, which effectively allow companies to maintain an effective negotiation process. 

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Benefits of Contract Apps

Evisort provides contract apps that effectively streamline the negotiation process. 

• Efficiency: Effective contract apps allow users to automate workflows and prevent them from making changes that are illegal. A company that deals with legal contracts every day will see exponential results from the reduction in labor hours; in fact, the whole process will be more efficient.
• Visibility: Evisort allows for increased visibility and 24/7 access to contracts.
• Organization: Contract apps assist companies in organizing their legal contracts, which is crucial to success. Ultimately, any contract can be found and viewed based on its date, type, sector, etc.
• Negotiation: With an effective contract app, there is no need for back-and-forth in-person negotiations; instead, all parties are notified of the tasks they need to complete. The review of contracts can now be done from all various locations simultaneously, eliminating the need for long meetings. They allow users to update contract versions, monitor changes, make comments, discuss, and share.

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Factors to Consider When Using Contract Apps 

• Rigid Approval Process: It is imperative that contract apps have multiple levels of user permissions and a multi-tiered approval process in order to protect the integrity of your contract. To prevent unauthorized modifications to contracts, the admin can set editing or view-only controls. It is also important to maintain the latest version of a document using document versioning. Where necessary, the system must allow reverting to previous versions.
• Third-Party Integration: Contract apps must be integrated with ERP or accounting systems so they can analyze the ROI of contracts. For budget forecasting and other financial reports, accounting needs quick access to contract terms. It should also integrate with key business and productivity apps like cloud storage, sales software, document management, and customer relationship management software.
• Security: It is always a major factor when it comes to vendors. You should look for security features such as two-factor authentication, data encryption, user permissions, and access management. Verify you are having a legitimate vendor that has a long-term reputation, like Evisort. 
• Automation: How can contract apps be made more efficient? Templates may be selected for entire contracts and clauses, reports can be generated, and stakeholders can be notified when approval is complete.

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Challenges of Contract Apps 

• Difficult Navigation of Content: In collaboration sessions with colleagues, it may be difficult to access certain words, lines, or pages when working on multiple contracts simultaneously. By using tools that allow for better categorization of content by departments, this can be solved.
• Compatibility Issues: It is difficult to share documents with other parties due to compatibility issues between different versions of Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF. It may be easier to implement a contract software solution that is web-based (HTML) and can be used by anyone, regardless of what device or operating system you are using, from Windows to Apple.
• Space Limitation: It is difficult for some users to find enough space in order to store all of their contracts online as well as share this information conveniently with other parties (as opposed to a single user having difficulty uploading dozens of documents).