Crucial Repository Features to Look For in Contract Management Software

Have you ever wondered about all the belongings you actually lose over a lifetime? When was the last time you saw that brown bomber jacket or prom photos from 12^th grade, for example? After all, we do seem to have quite a lot of “stuff” to keep up with.

It’s been suggested that the average American home contains 300,000 items. Homes have tripled in size over the last 50 years, but 25 percent of people with 2-car garages can’t park in them because they’re full of stuff. Luckily, the United States is blessed to have 50,000 storage facilities! That amounts to 7.3 square feet of storage space for every person in the country, including those who aren’t even old enough to accumulate stuff.

Unfortunately, we still can’t keep up with everything. According to a British study (we’ll assume Americans are quite similar), the average person loses over 3000 objects throughout his or her life. Adults typically lose, just to name a few items, keys, phones, money, credit cards, umbrellas, wallets, jewelry, gloves, glasses, and memory sticks.

Wait – what was that last item? We can only hope the memory sticks don’t contain the latest drafts of important contracts from work! In all seriousness, though, loss of contracts is a bigger concern than you might think for many businesses, making the need for a sophisticated, digitized, and easy-to-use contract repository (sometimes called document repository) all the more crucial.

Businesses Have Reason for Concern

According to Mozy research, 70 percent of Americans have lost a data storage device. More than half of those people were more concerned about the loss of the data than the loss of the device, which makes perfect sense to us. Boston Computing Network reveals the following data statistics:

• Almost one-third of personal computer users have lost all of their data, resulting from events out of their control.

• Of businesses that lose their data center for 10 or more days, 93 percent ultimately file for bankruptcy.

• Approximately 6 percent of computers lose data each year.

• Computers in the United States suffer 140,000 hard drive crashes weekly.

Obviously, important documents are sometimes lost due to no fault of our own, and other times directly due to our own neglect. And while you may not be too worried about the loss of last year’s company newsletters, you can get into hot water when hard drive crashes or other mishaps affect your company’s contracts with vendors or clients. To wit, studies have determined that 71 percent of companies cannot locate 10 percent or more of the company’s contracts.

All of these data points spell disaster for efficiency in monitoring and maximizing an enterprise’s agreements. But a good contract management system offers the perfect solution: a centralized contract repository (document repository) to streamline storage of all that contractual “stuff”!

Take Advantage of a Centralized Contract/Document Repository

With ContractSafe’s contract management system, all contracts and other important documents are converted into searchable text using OCR technology, then stored in a centralized repository. Now, all of your contracts are indexed and located in one place where you can easily find them at any time, from any computer with an internet connection.

Our contract repository technology also allows you to connect all related documents to one another. Thus, if you want to review every contract and document related to one specific customer or project, it’s as easy as punching a button on your keyboard.

But the efficiency doesn’t end with a digitized contract repository. Below, we’ll show you all the other ways our contract management system can help you keep up with your contracts, and the features to look for.

• Searchable text – Once digitized, all your contracts can be searched with Google-type searches, and it’s nearly instantaneous! Also, you can easily search across all your documents or within a single document for a specific clause.

• Contract protection – You can forget ever having an employee lose or damage an important contract again, because they’re all stored in our centralized document repository. You’re also protected against hard-drive crashes or natural disasters at your premises: we have automatic backups and redundancy, so that all of your contracts stay safe.

• Cloud computing and data safety – At ContractSafe, we take full advantage of the cloud and use bank-level security features to protect data from outside threats. All data is encrypted and hosted on Amazon Web Services, data centers are audited to comply with top-level certifications, and we scan regularly for vulnerabilities and intrusions. We even hire hackers to try to break in so that we are always one step ahead of the game! That’s why we have SOC2 certification for online security.

• Centralized Dates/Reminders – Having everything in one place allows you to easily see what key dates are coming up, to quickly see which contracts don't have reminders set up, and to pull up all reminders for a vendor, team, division or project.

• Simple sharing of documents – Our document repository allows you to securely email documents into and out of your ContractSafe repository, and even organize them by client or account. Plus, managers can designate “no delete” and “read only” users, or limit access to certain types of contracts, so you don’t have to compromise security for access.