document management

10 Years in Business … and a cautionary tale

Posted on by

Image

Blueridge Software this month celebrates the 10-year anniversary of Contract Assistant – the leading contract management software for organizations of any size and budget.

Ten years of stable growth, product releases, and customer support is a proud milestone. It is something our customers can also appreciate, considering Contract Assistant is the business tool they use to help manage the contracts and documents that govern business-wide operations of all types.

Yet all is not necessarily good in the contract management world. Many software companies offer their products as software-as-a-service (SaaS), offering their services on a subscription basis via the web. It sounds like a good idea, but consider what happened to Mumboe.

A few months ago, our industry reported the hasty closure of Mumboe, an SaaS contract management company. It gave clients just two weeks to access and download all of their stored data before shutting down its site and web-based service for good in November 2011. Such a rapid shutdown was a tough enough situation for Mumboe customers, but consider, too, that many were left to scramble and search for replacement contract management software.

Nothing demonstrates the pitfall of trusting SaaS quite as well as the Mumboe event. SaaS companies store your information and records on their system. And in the event of a service failure or company shuttering, you may or may not get those records back; and if you do, they may not be in a viable file format for you to use. Granted, the anytime/anywhere access and instant software updates have a certain appeal, but keep in mind the drawbacks of vulnerability to Internet service interruptions and application closures.

Now, consider the difference we offer with Contact Assistant: when you purchase and own the software outright, your critical contracts and other legal documents remain on your system and under your full control.

Access to your data and to the program is indefinite, regardless of the selling company’s future state, your Internet service connection, or whatever else. With virtualization options available, you can set up anytime/anywhere access to the program across the devices and access points you use to run your business. Plus, you can rest assured that with your information stored on your network, you have control over its security.

So while Blueridge Software celebrates the 10th year anniversary of Contract Assistant, we hope all our customers have found some peace of mind with our purchased solution.

Hot topics in contract management solutions

Posted on by
Contract Management Software

Contract Management Software

We started this blog just 18 months ago, so we thought this would be a good time to take stock of what feedback we’ve received from visitors. It is clear that readers have an interest in our blog, but the following are the three most popular blogs posted (so far, that is).

Top Three Most Popular Posts

  1. News Flash: Introducing Contract Assistant PRO Edition 3.7!
  2. Key Benefits of Contact Administration
  3. 8 Steps to Choosing a Contract Management Solution

What’s driving the interest in new versions, key benefits and how to select contract management software?

Taken together, these three topics are a snapshot of where many people in large and small enterprises find themselves: knowing there has to be a solution out there, and wondering what the real benefits are. After all, businesses today have more contracts than ever — and those contracts are increasingly complex. Add to that situation an ever-increasing pressure to drive costs lower and the result is longer-term agreements with suppliers of all types.

For many employees and business owners, this combination of circumstances cries out for a way to better manage contracts to reduce risk, centralize information and generally make a difficult, disjointed process more coherent.

So we see the interest in choosing a contract management solution, and interest in benefits. And of course, interest in Contract Assistant naturally follows that. We see a lot of interest in our free 30-day trial as well as our free 30-minute demo of the product as well.

Considering the list of risks associated with no or poor contract management, is it any wonder why readers are exploring the benefits, best practices, and case studies?

For more information about document retention policies, see this prior post. And here is a quick case study of how Texas A&M-Corpus Christi solved their contract management issues with Contract Assistant.

Avoiding contract crisis: Putting contract management on the “important” list

Posted on by

By: Judy Tucker, business consultant, Blueridge Software, Inc.

Crisis Trap - Contract Management Software

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I had the luck to be caught up in the early days of the PC industry. Knowing nothing about computers, I stumbled into a fledging software company and soon found myself climbing what passed for a corporate ladder.

Those were heady times, as the power of computing moved from huge machines kept behind locked doors to small boxes sitting on the desks of ordinary people. The growth rate of our young company was insane. I knew there were things I wasn’t getting to, that there were things that as an organization we weren’t getting to, and that some of those things were important.

Continue reading →

Key Benefits of Contract Administration

Posted on by

contract administrationIn previous posts, we’ve talked about how contracts are an important part of administering your business operations and how contract management software is a leading tool to help you stay organized. Maybe that’s why you are investigating – or have even already purchased – contract management software.

Implementing a solution, however, isn’t just about importing contracts to have electronic copies and then maybe setting a few alarms to remind you of key dates. To proactively reduce risk and business liability, and maximize operational efficiency and profitability, you need to practice effective contract administration – the ongoing governance of each contract.

Continue reading →

How contract management software can help your document retention policy

Posted on by

document retentionDepending on your industry, document and record retention can be vital – if not required by law – for your company to do business.

Due to required document retention policies in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA), document management and retention has risen to a high priority among CIOs and others.

Consider the need to retain agreements to meet legal requirements when contracting to local, state or federal entities. As a post on the website Government Video points out, “…when you do business with the government, you are under a duty to retain contract, cost, and pricing records for a certain period of time, generally three years from the date of final payment… For certain records, the period runs from the end of the fiscal year in which the cost was incurred, so that the actual retention period could last even longer.”

Continue reading →